Quotes about Reflection

Before you pray, check to see whether you believe or doubt that you will be heard. If you are doubting or uncertain, or if you are merely trying a prayer to see what happens, your prayer won't be worth anything.

We need a millstone around our neck to keep us humble.

If I go back home to Wittenberg, I'll lie down in a coffin and give the maggots a fat doctor to eat.

For more than twenty years I was a pious monk, read Mass daily, and so weakened myself with fasting and praying that I would not have been long for this life had I continued. Yet all this taken together cannot help me in even one little crisis to be able to say before God: 'All this I have done, now please consider it, and be gracious to me.' What else did I achieve with this than to plague myself uselessly, impair my health, and waste my time?

For the statement of Isaiah (28:19) is true: "Trouble gives understanding"; likewise, hunger is the best condiment. For those who are afflicted have a better understanding of the Holy Scriptures; the smug and prosperous read them as if they were some poem written by Ovid.

Thus although Nebuchadnezzar no longer remembered his dream, yet he could not forget the impression it made.

For it is not possible to make the mercy of God large and good, unless a person first makes his miseries large and evil or recognizes them to be such. To make God's mercy great is not, as is commonly supposed, to think that God considers sins as small or that He does not punish them.

If I examine myself I find enough unholiness to shock me. But when I look at Christ in me I find that I am altogether holy.

Hence one should follow the advice of the hermit to whom a youth complained that he rather often experienced imaginations concerned with lusts and other sins and to whom the old man replied: "You cannot prevent the birds from flying over your head. But let them only fly and do not let them build nests in the hair of your head. Let them be thoughts and remain such; but do not let them become conclusions."32

I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Forgiveness is not an occasional act it is an attitude.