Top 35 Edith Stein Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “The world doesn’t need what women have, it needs what women are.”

— Edith Stein

2. “And when night comes, and you look back over the day and see how fragmentary everything has been, and how much you planned that has gone undone, and all the reasons you have to be embarrassed and ashamed: just take everything exactly as it is, put it in God’s hands and leave it with Him.”

— Edith Stein

3. “The woman’s soul is fashioned as a shelter in which other souls may unfold.”

— Edith Stein

4. “Anyone who seeks truth seeks God, whether or not he realizes it.”

— Edith Stein

5. “Let go of your plans. The first hour of your morning belongs to God. Tackle the day’s work that he charges you with, and he will give you the power to accomplish it.”

— Edith Stein

6. “Those who remain silent are responsible.”

— Edith Stein

7. “Each woman who lives in the light of eternity can fulfill her vocation, no matter if it is in marriage, in a religious order, or in a worldly profession.”

— Edith Stein

8. “Just take everything exactly as it is, put it in God’s hands and leave it with Him.”

— Edith Stein

9. “One cannot desire freedom from the Cross when one is especially chosen for the Cross.”

— Edith Stein

10. “Do not accept anything as love which lacks truth.”

— Edith Stein

11. “On the question of relating to our fellowman – our neighbor’s spiritual need transcends every commandment. Everything else we do is a means to an end. But love is an end already, since God is love.”

— Edith Stein

12. “Who can sleep on the night that God became man?”

— Edith Stein

13. “Woman naturally seeks to embrace that which is living, personal, and whole. To cherish, guard, protect, nourish and advance growth is her natural, maternal yearning.”

— Edith Stein

14. “Usually one gets a heavier cross when one attempts to get rid of an old one.”

— Edith Stein

15. “Each finite creature can reflect only a fraction of the divine nature; thus, in the diversity of His creatures, God’s infinity, unity and oneness appear to be broken into an effulfgence of manifold rays.”

— Edith Stein

16. “My longing for truth was a single prayer.”

— Edith Stein

17. “Woman’s soul is present and lives more intensely in all parts of the body, and it is inwardly affected by that which happens to the body; whereas, with men, the body has more pronoucedly the character of an instrument which serves them in their work and which is accompanied by a certain detachment.”

— Edith Stein

18. “The limitless loving devotion to God, and the gift God makes of Himself to you, are the highest elevation of which the heart is capable; it is the highest degree of prayer. The souls that have reached this point are truly the heart of the Church.”

— Edith Stein

19. “The Bread that we need each day to grow in eternal life, makes of our will a docile instrument of the Divine Will; sets the Kingdom of God within us; gives us pure lips, and a pure heart with which to glorify his holy name.”

— Edith Stein

20. “The motive, principle, and end of the religious life is to make an absolute gift of self to God in a self-forgetting love, to end one’s own life in order to make room for God’s life.”

— Edith Stein

21. “I had given up practising my Jewish religion when I was a 14-year-old girl and did not begin to feel Jewish again until I had returned to God.”

— Edith Stein

22. “There is no profession which cannot be practiced by a woman.”

— Edith Stein

23. “An ‘I’ without a body is a possibility. But a body without an ‘I’ is utterly impossible.”

— Edith Stein

24. “All those who seek truth, seek God, whether this is clear to them or not.”

— Edith Stein

25. “Those who join the Carmelite Order are not lost to their near and dear ones, but have been won for them, because it is our vocation to intercede to God for everyone.”

— Edith Stein

26. “We will always find fundamentally the compulsion to become what the soul should be...”

— Edith Stein

27. “One could say that in case of need, every normal and healthy woman is able to hold a position. And there is no profession which cannot be practiced by a woman.”

— Edith Stein

28. “At first, after her conversion she thought she would have to renounce all that was secular and live totally immersed in God, but then she realized that, even in the contemplative life, you cannot sever all connection with the world, that the deeper you are drawn into God, the more you must go out of yourself to the world in order to carry the divine life into it.”

— Edith Stein

29. “To suffer and to be happy although suffering, to have one’s feet on the earth, to walk on the dirty and rough paths of this earth and yet to be enthroned with Christ at the Father’s right hand, to laugh and cry with the children of this world and ceaselessly sing the praises of God with the choirs of angels – this is the life of the Christian until the morning of eternity breaks forth.”

— Edith Stein

30. “Everything abstract is ultimately part of the concrete. Everything inanimate finally serves the living. That is why every activity dealing in abstraction stands in ultimate service to a living whole.”

— Edith Stein

31. “We can do nothing ourselves; God must do it. To speak to Him thus is easier by nature for woman than for man because a natural desire lives in her to give herself completely to someone.”

— Edith Stein

32. “Everywhere the need exists for maternal sympathy and help...”

— Edith Stein

33. “Energy apparently increases with the amount of work to be done. When nothing of burning urgency is waiting, it decreases much sooner. Heaven seems to understand such economy.”

— Edith Stein

34. “Appropriate environmental influences can prevent mistakes. The soul of a child is soft and impressionable. Whatever influence enters there can easily form it for a lifetime. When the facts of salvation history are introduced in early childhood and in an appropriate form, this may easily lay a foundation for a saintly life.”

— Edith Stein

35. “You can be at all fronts, wherever there is grief, in the power of the cross. Your compassionate love takes you everywhere, this love from the divine heart. Its precious blood is poured everywhere, soothing, healing, saving.”

— Edith Stein

36. “Those who seek the truth seek God, whether they realize it or not.”

— Edith Stein

37. “If the mystery of the cross becomes the inner form of this science, a living energy that allows the soul to be molded by what is received from this mystery, it turns into a science of the cross. On the contrary, excessive interior preoccupation with one’s own personal concerns can develop in the course of life into a general indifference to things religious.”

— Edith Stein

38. “Once while Edith was visiting the cathedral of Frankfurt, a woman with a market basket entered and knelt down in one of the pews to pray briefly. This was something entirely new to her, leaving as deep an impression as the university lectures.”

— Edith Stein

39. “At some point we must plunge in to discover a greater expanse; yet when this broader horizon does appear, a new depth will open up at our point of entry.”

— Edith Stein