Quotes about Sacrifice
But we the faithful share in the action by uniting ourselves to the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ which is made present in the Mass, and by offering our adoration, and our very selves, and all our work and our joys and our sufferings, and our aspirations, to God as the particular things which we alone can offer. No one else can offer me to the Lord. This is an act which I alone can carry out.
— Thomas Howard
The Mass would be sterile and futile if it were locked and sealed inside one magic hour of the week. Like Calvary itself, the whole point of it is that it overflow. Our Lord's life (his Blood) was poured out, spilled onto the ground; and, says faith, from the soil on Golgotha it spread to cover the whole earth. Just so, you and I take our own place at Calvary so that our whole life may be spilled as an oblation to God for the life of the world.
— Thomas Howard
We had come to this place to offer something to God, namely, the sacrifice of praise. I came to realize that there was more than a mere difference in phraseology between this and what I had always thought of as worship. There was a difference in vision.
— Thomas Howard
Mass celebrated on the hood of a jeep with shells bursting all around is as much the Mass as the liturgy celebrated in St John Lateran by the Bishop of Rome himself.
— Thomas Howard
Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.
— Thomas Jefferson
I have the consolation of having added nothing to my private fortune during my public service, and of retiring with hands clean as they are empty.
— Thomas Jefferson
If you serve humanity, you serve humanity's God.
— Thomas Jefferson
This is the crucifixion of Christ: in which He dies again and again in the individuals who were made to share the joy and freedom of His grace, and who deny Him.
— Thomas Merton
See, see Who God is, see the glory of God, going up to Him out of this incomprehensible and infinite Sacrifice in which all history begins and ends, all individual lives begin and end, in which every story is told, and finished, and settled for joy or for sorrow: the one point of reference for all the truths that are outside of God, their center, their focus: Love.
— Thomas Merton
And yet with every wound You robbed me of a crime, And as each blow was paid with Blood, You paid me also each great sin with greater graces. For even as I killed You, You made Yourself a greater thief than any in Your company, Stealing my sins into Your dying life, Robbing me even of my death.
— Thomas Merton
Consequently, the truth of God lives in our souls more by the power of superior moral courage than by the light of an eminent intelligence. Indeed, spiritual intelligence itself depends on the fortitude and patience with which we sacrifice ourselves for the truth, as it is communicated to our lives concretely in the providential will of God
— Thomas Merton
The first step to unselfish love is the recognition that our love may be deluded. We must first of all purify our love by renouncing the pleasure of loving as an end in itself. As long as pleasure is our end, we will be dishonest with ourselves and with those we love. We will not seek their good, but our own pleasure.
— Thomas Merton