Quotes about Understanding

The Father's love does not force itself on the beloved.

Be compassionate just as your Father is compassionate.

From that heart come the words, "Do you love me?" Knowing the heart of Jesus and loving him are the same thing. The knowledge of Jesus' heart is a knowledge of the heart.

We might be competent in many subjects, but we cannot become an expert in the things of God. God is greater than our minds and cannot be caught within the boundaries of our finite concepts. Thus, spiritual formation leads not to a proud understanding of divinity, but to docta ignorantia, an "articulate not-knowing.

When we live with a solitude of heart, we can listen with attention to the words and the worlds of others, but when we are driven by loneliness, we tend to select just those remarks and events that bring immediate satisfaction to our own craving needs.

We will never believe that we have anything to give unless there is someone who is able to receive.

When you can look into the face of another human being and you have enough light in you to recognize your brother or you sister. Until then it is night, and darkness is still with us.

Prayer, which is breathing with the Spirit of Jesus, leads us to this immense knowledge.

The joy at the dramatic return of the younger son in no way means that the elder son was less loved, less appreciated, less favored. The father does not compare the two sons. He loves them both with a complete love and expresses that love according to their individual journeys.

what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others.

To care for others requires an ever-increasing acceptance.

Jesus, of course, had this capacity to see truly. For example, Saint John tells us, Jesus did not want to entrust himself to them because he knew what was in every heart (John 2:24). Such intuitive and perceptive knowledge is the nature of discernment.