Top 40 Gerald G. May Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “While repression stifles desire, addiction attaches desire, bonds and enslaves the energy of desire to certain specific behaviors, things, or people. These objects of attachment then become preoccupations and obsessions; they come to rule our lives. The.”

— Gerald G. May

2. “But one thing is certain: the process of freedom is one of subtraction – we are left more empty than when we began.”

— Gerald G. May

3. “The dawn is an awakening to a deepening realization of who we really are in and with God and the world, and of what has been going on within us in the night.”

— Gerald G. May

4. “Thus God calls us, invites us, and even commands us, but God does not control our response. We alone bear responsibility for the choices we make.”

— Gerald G. May

5. “Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”11.”

— Gerald G. May

6. “Guilt says, “If only you had done it better.” Shame says, “If only you had been better.”

— Gerald G. May

7. “Many of the old understandings to which I had been addicted were stripped away, leaving a desertlike spaciousness where my customary props and securities no longer existed. Grace was able to flow into this emptiness, and something new was able to grow. Fresh understandings took root, and the insights that emerged were clearer, simpler, and more beautiful.”

— Gerald G. May

8. “When we are really given to the why of life, the hows begin to flow.”

— Gerald G. May

9. “The bare edge of freedom is insured and preserved inside us by God, and no matter what forces oppress us from without or within, it is indestructible.19.”

— Gerald G. May

10. “Grace is the most powerful force in the universe. It can transcend repression, addiction, and every other internal or external power that seeks to oppress the freedom of the human heart. Grace is where our hope lies. Journey.”

— Gerald G. May

11. “This deepening of love is the real purpose of the dark night of the soul. The dark night helps us become who we are created to be: lovers of God and one another.”

— Gerald G. May

12. “In a spiritual sense, the objects of our attachments and addictions become idols. We give them our time, energy, and attention whether we want to or not, even – and often especially – when we are struggling to rid ourselves of them. We want to be free, compassionate, and happy, but in the face of our attachments we are clinging, grasping, and fearfully self-absorbed.”

— Gerald G. May

13. “Similarly, grace seeks us but will not control us. Saint Augustine once said that God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them. If our hands are full, they are full of the things to which we are addicted. And not only our hands, but also our hearts, minds, and attention are clogged with addiction. Our addictions fill up the spaces within us, spaces where grace might flow.”

— Gerald G. May

14. “The darkness of the night implies nothing sinister, only that the liberation takes place in hidden ways, beneath our knowledge and understanding.”

— Gerald G. May

15. “A sense of balance within spaciousness remains within such people, like a window between infinity and the world of everyday experience. They are not only wiser and humbler because of their addictions; they are also more available. Through their spaciousness, they are continually invited homeward.”

— Gerald G. May

16. “We cling to things, people, beliefs, and behaviors not because we love them, but because we are terrified of losing them.”

— Gerald G. May

17. “For God has comforted Zion, and will take pity on all her waste places; Turning her wilderness into an Eden, her desert into the garden of God. Joy and gladness will be found in her, and thanksgiving, and the sounds of singing.”12.”

— Gerald G. May

18. “Life is not a matter of reaching a stagnant end point, but is rather an ongoing process in which one, hopefully and with grace, grows ever more deeply in love.”

— Gerald G. May

19. “Regardless of when and how it happens, the dark night of the soul is the transition from bondage to freedom in prayer and in every other aspect of life.”

— Gerald G. May

20. “God darkens our awareness in order to keep us safe. When we cannot chart our own course, we become vulnerable to God’s protection, and the darkness becomes a “guiding night,” a “night more kindly than the dawn.”5.”

— Gerald G. May

21. “Joy is the reaction one has to the full appreciation of Being. It is one’s response to finding one’s rightful, rooted place in life, and it can happen only when one knows through and through that absolutely nothing is being denied or otherwise shut out of awareness.”

— Gerald G. May

22. “If we are honest, I think we have to admit that we will likely try to sabotage any movement toward true freedom. If we really knew what we were called to relinquish on this journey, our defenses would never allow us to take the first step. Sometimes the only way we can enter the deeper dimensions of the journey is by being unable to see where we’re going.”

— Gerald G. May

23. “The glory of God is a human being fully alive. – Ireneaus1.”

— Gerald G. May

24. “Only in the pauses between things, in the brief contemplative spaces of just being, can we catch a glimpse of love itself.”

— Gerald G. May

25. “Maybe, sometimes, in the midst of things going terribly wrong, something is going just right.”

— Gerald G. May

26. “The facts of grace are simple: grace always exists, it is always available, it is always good, and it is always victorious. For me, living into grace means trying to act on the basis of these facts. I do not do well at it. My.”

— Gerald G. May

27. “True love is like some infinite way of being that we become part of: a flowing energy of willingness, an eternal yes resounding with every heartbeat.”

— Gerald G. May

28. “The word comes from Latin roots com and templum, “with” and “temple.”

— Gerald G. May

29. “Gently but irrevocably, we are captured by freedom. It is useless to be concerned about whether to choose; the real questions are how and why we choose. Our identity is solidly rooted in our hearts’ desire for love – we are made to love – but our character emerges in the choices we make about that desire. Being in love is given to us with our very lives, but the pulse of our living, our real participation in creation, is our choosing: choosing among our loves and choosing love itself.”

— Gerald G. May

30. “The dark night is a profoundly good thing. It is an ongoing spiritual process in which we are liberated from attachments and compulsions and empowered to live and love more freely.”

— Gerald G. May

31. “The Invitation of Love If we want to set the relationship between efficiency and love in its rightful order, we must go beyond laws and proclamations. If we desire a more loving society, we individual persons must return to the deepest common sense of our hearts; we must claim love as our true treasure. Then comes the difficult part: we must try to live according to our desire in the moment-by-moment experiences of our lives.”

— Gerald G. May

32. “Being in love, however, is something we say yes to. It is a willing yielding into love’s presence. It is a conscious easing of defenses. When we accept the presence of love and give ourselves to it, we glimpse immense freedom and spaciousness. There is room to move around, unencumbered by fear and doubt. Being in love is like a breath of liberation for our spirits. It awakens our passion and inspires a vitality within us that we never knew we had. Love always seeks freedom; love wants to play.”

— Gerald G. May

33. “When my supply of success at this egotistic autonomy ran out, I became depressed. And with the depression, by means of grace, came a chance for spiritual openness. I.”

— Gerald G. May

34. “Liberation, whether experienced pleasurably or painfully, always involves relinquishment, some kind of loss.”

— Gerald G. May

35. “We may yearn to “let go and let God,” but it usually doesn’t happen until we have exhausted our own efforts.”

— Gerald G. May

36. “But they are trials and tests for our own growth, not for God to find out how good we are. God knows that we are good; it is for us to discover that goodness. As we have seen, the tests of attachment, by bringing us to our knees in humility, may show us the way of goodness and allow us to choose that goodness with our whole being. We.”

— Gerald G. May

37. “Hope can sometimes be an elusive thing, and occasionally it must come to us with pain. But it is there, irrevocably. Like freedom, hope is a child of grace, and grace cannot be stopped. I refer once more to Saint Paul, a man who, I am convinced, understood addiction: “Hope will not be denied, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts.”

— Gerald G. May

38. “It is not that they are unconcerned with social liberation and justice, but that they are convinced such transformation will happen only through the changing of individual hearts.”

— Gerald G. May

39. “The spiritual life for Teresa and John has nothing to do with actually getting closer to God. It is instead a journey of consciousness. Union with God is neither acquired nor received; it is realized, and in that sense it is something that can be yearned for, sought after, and – with God’s grace – found.”

— Gerald G. May

40. “It is impossible for anyone to adequately express the deep movements of love within the spiritual life. It cannot be done by words, by art, or by any way other than the love with which one lives one’s life.”

— Gerald G. May

41. “Before, one needed God as the agent of recovery, the divine dispenser of grace. Now this need is developing into a love for God as God’s self. This is a beautiful happening, but it brings with it a new relinquishment that can feel deeply threatening. Along with the sweetness of emerging love comes a certain shakiness about recovery. Recovery is no longer the single most important thing in life. Something else has taken its place, and the fear of relapse grows.”

— Gerald G. May

42. “Resolutions mean willpower, willpower means achievement, achievement means success and failure, and the whole sequence means losing an appreciation of the gift. I have learned two sure things in the struggle between my desire for love and the oppression of my attachments. The first is that God is absolutely trustworthy. The second is that resolutions are absolutely not.”

— Gerald G. May

43. “Grace empowers us to choose rightly in what seem to be the most choiceless of situations, but it does not, and will not, determine that choice.8 For.”

— Gerald G. May

44. “In the great spiritual traditions of the world, attachments are seen as any concerns that usurp our desire for love, anything that becomes more important to us than God. Paul Tillich said that whatever we are ultimately concerned with is God for us. At any given moment, that with which we are most concerned is most likely to be something other than the true God. No matter how religious we may think we are, our addictions are always capable of usurping our concern for God.”

— Gerald G. May

45. “We can perform service to others for a variety of reasons. We can do good deeds because of fear, guilt, or the desire to inflate our egos. But if we really want to be loving, if we truly wish to respond to the call of justice and freedom, we must first have the courage to look into our own emptiness. We must somehow even come to love it.”

— Gerald G. May

46. “Adapting to change, then, means going through the stress of withdrawal from the old normality and finding relief when a new normality is established.”

— Gerald G. May

47. “Inside us all, in the depths of our winters, things are going on, things we will have no clue of until spring comes, and perhaps not even then.”

— Gerald G. May