Quotes about Patience

One of the greatest acts of faith is to believe that the few years we live on this earth are like a little seed planted in a very rich soil. For this seed to bear fruit, it must die. We often see or feel only the dying, but the harvest will be abundant even when we ourselves are not the harvesters.

A friend once wrote: "Learning to weep, learning to keep vigil, learning to wait for the dawn. Perhaps this is what it means to be human.

The time has come to claim your true vocation—to be a father who can welcome his children home without asking them any questions and without wanting anything from them in return. Look at the father in your painting and you will know who you are called to be.

Don't be afraid. Don't run off. Trust that Christ will be born in that place.

The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing... not healing, not curing... that is a friend who cares.

Waiting is a dry desert between where we are and where we want to be. (Finding My Way Home)

It is hard to bear with people who stand still along the way, lose heart, and seek their happiness in little pleasures which they cling to...You feel sad about all that self-indulgence and self-satisfaction, for you know with an indestructible certainty that something greater is coming.

If God wants to give you more than you are asking, would you rather have what you are asking or what God wants to give?

When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short." [ Letter to Harrison Blake ; November 16, 1857]