Quotes about Retired

As it is with the love of the body, so with the friendship of the mind, the full is only reached by admittance to the most retired places.

Do not forecast where the temptation will come; it is the least likely thing that is the peril. In the aftermath of a great spiritual transaction the "retired sphere of the leasts" begins to tell; it is not dominant, but remember it is there, and if you are not warned, it will trip you up.

To live a remote, retired, secluded life is the antipodes of spirituality as Jesus Christ taught it. The test of our spirituality comes when we come up against injustice and meanness and ingratitude and turmoil, all of which have the tendency to make us spiritual sluggards.

You are nothing unless it comes from your heart. Passion, caring, really looking to create excellence. If you perform functions only and go to work only to do processes, then you are effectively retired. And it scares me—most people I see, by age twenty-eight are retired.

It is fitting that we arise with thankfulness and praise to God. This is fundamental and will be a natural (and supernatural!) beginning to your day after having retired in faith and prayer.

I, retired in prayer, will always be with you, and together we will move ahead with the Lord in certainty. The Lord is victorious.

Finally, my old and now retired spiritual director, Larry Hein, who wrote this blessing—"May all your expectations be frustrated, may all your plans be thwarted, may all your desires be withered into nothingness, that you may experience the powerlessness and poverty of a child and sing and dance in the love of God, who is Father, Son, and Spirit"— has come up with another one:

Virtue could see to do what virtue would by her own radiant light, though sun and moon were in the flat sea sunk. And Wisdom's self oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, where, with her best nurse contemplation, she plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings.

He had acted so strangely before they retired, she thought. Withdrawn. He was like one come back from the dead, not yet fully aware of his return, his eyes half shut and glassy with the inward stare. It made her think of his warning about the spice-impregnated diet: addictive.