John Henry Newman Quotes

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission.

To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault.

God knows what is my greatest happiness, but I do not. There is no rule about what is happy and good; what suits one would not suit another. And the ways by which perfection is reached vary very much; the medicines necessary for our souls are very different from each other. Thus God leads us by strange ways; we know He wills our happiness, but we neither know what our happiness is, nor the way. We are blind; left to ourselves we should take the wrong way; we must leave it to Him.

There are wounds of the spirit which never close and are intended in God's mercy to bring us nearer to Him, and to prevent us leaving Him by their very perpetuity. Such wounds then may almost be taken as a pledge, or at least as a ground for a humble trust, that God will give us the great gift of perseverance to the end. This is how I comfort myself in my own great bereavements.

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another, I have my mission ... He has not created me for naught ... If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about.

Dear Lord...shine through me, and be so in me that every soul I come in contact with may feel Your presence in my soul...Let me thus praise You in the way You love best, by shining on those around me.

Life passes, riches fly away, popularity is fickle, the senses decay, the world changes. One alone is true to us; One alone can be all things to us; One alone can supply our need.

From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery.

May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done! Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last.

Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather fear that it shall never have a beginning.

If we are intended for great ends, we are called to great hazards.

It is often said that second thoughts are best. So they are in matters of judgment but not in matters of conscience.

We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.

God has created me to do him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission; I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I have a part in a great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling.

I will trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us. He does nothing in vain.

Cruelty to animals is as if humans did not love God.

You must be patient, you must wait for the eye of the soul to be formed in you. Religious truth is reached, not by reasoning, but by an inward perception. Anyone can reason; only disciplined, educated, formed minds can perceive.

I sought to hear the voice of God and climbed the topmost steeple, but God declared: "Go down again - I dwell among the people.

Purity prepares the soul for love, and love confirms the soul in purity.

When you feel in need of a compliment, give one to someone else.

Now what is it that moves our very hearts and sickens us so much at cruelty shown to poor brutes?.. They have done us no harm and they have no power of resistance... There is something so very dreadful, so Satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.

All that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary, natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as material, comes from God.

Christ is already in that place of peace, which is all in all. He is on the right hand of God. He is hidden in the brightness of the radiance which issues from the everlasting throne. He is in the very abyss of peace, where there is no voice of tumult or distress, but a deep stillness--stillness, that greatest and most awful of all goods which we can fancy; that most perfect of joys, the utter profound, ineffable tranquillity of the Divine Essence. He has entered into His rest. That is our home; here we are on a pilgrimage, and Christ calls us to His many mansions which He has prepared.

The reason why Christ is unknown today is because His Mother is unknown.

The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma; no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.

It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing.

I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it.

To take up the cross of Christ is no great action done once for all; it consists in the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us.

Prayer is to the spiritual life what the beating of the pulse and the drawing of the breath are to the life of the body.

To holy people the very name of Jesus is a name to feed upon, a name to transport. His name can raise the dead and transfigure and beautify the living.

A cloud of incense was rising on high; the people suddenly all bowed low; what could it mean? The truth flashed on him, fearfully yet sweetly; it was the Blessed Sacrament - it was the Lord Incarnate who was on the altar, who had come to visit and bless his people. It was the Great Presence, which makes a Catholic Church different from every other place in the world; which makes it, as no other place can be - holy.

I wonder what day I shall die on - one passes year by year over one's death day, as one might pass over one's grave.

It is not God's way that great blessings should descend without the sacrifice first of great sufferings. If the truth is to be spread to any wide extent among the people, how can we dream, how can we hope, that trial and trouble shall not accompany its going forth.

Growth is the only evidence of life.

God has created all things for good; all things for their greatest good; everything for its own good. What is the good of one is not the good of another; what makes one man happy would make another unhappy. God has determined, unless I interfere with His plan, that I should reach that which will be my greatest happiness. He looks on me individually, He calls me by my name, He knows what I can do, what I can best be, what is my greatest happiness, and He means to give it me.

Let us act on what we have, since we have not what we wish.

Faith is the result of the act of the will, following upon a conviction that to believe is a duty.

Somehow I am necessary for His purposes, as necessary in my place as an Archangel in his.

Brutes gaze on sights, they are arrested by sounds; and what they see and what they hear are sights and sounds only. The intellectof man, on the contrary, energises as well as his eye or ear, and perceives in sights or sounds something beyond them. It seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what need not be seen or heard except in detail. It discerns in lines and colors, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is not. It gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea.

It is seldom we have the heart to throw ourselves, if I may so speak, on the Divine Arm; we dare not trust ourselves on the waters, though Christ bids us. We have not St. Peter's love to ask leave to come to him upon the sea. When we once are filled with that heavenly charity, we can do all things, because we attempt all things - for to attempt is to do.

We should ever conduct ourselves towards our enemy as if he were one day to be our friend.

You must make up your mind to the prospect of sustaining a certain measure of pain and trouble in you'r passage through life.

Learn to do thy part and leave the rest to Heaven.

How can we understand forgiveness if we haven't recognized the depth of our sin?

There is a knowledge which is desirable, though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure, and a sufficient remuneration of years of labor.

And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved long since and lost awhile.

Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom, lead thou me on.

The attributes of God, though intelligible to us on their surface yet, for the very reason that they are infinite, transcend our comprehension, when they are dwelt upon, when they are followed out, and can only be received by faith.

Evil has no substance of its own, but is only the defect, excess, perversion, or corruption of that which has substance.