Top 120 Joan D. Chittister Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life is the ability to start over again.”

— Joan D. Chittister

Featured in: Recovery Quotes

2. “Hospitality is simply love on the loose.”

— Joan D. Chittister

3. “Find the thing that stirs your heart and make room for it.”

— Joan D. Chittister

4. “The purpose of leadership is not to make the present bearable. The purpose of leadership is to make the future possible.”

— Joan D. Chittister

5. “It’s the beauty within us that makes it possible for us to recognize the beauty around us.”

— Joan D. Chittister

6. “There is no amount of darkness that can extinguish the inner light. The important thing is not to spend our lives trying to control the environment around us. The task is to control the environment within us.”

— Joan D. Chittister

7. “Darkness deserves gratitude. It is the alleluia point at which we learn to understand that all growth does not take place in the sunlight.”

— Joan D. Chittister

8. “The secret of life is to let every segment of it produce its own yield at its own pace. Every period has something new to teach us. The harvest of youth is achievement; the harvest of middle-age is perspective; the harvest of age is wisdom; the harvest of life is serenity.”

— Joan D. Chittister

9. “Hope is what sits by the window and waits for one more dawn, despite the fact that there isn’t an ounce of proof in tonight’s black, black sky that it can possible come.”

— Joan D. Chittister

10. “Anger is not bad. Anger can be a very positive thing, the thing that moves us beyond the acceptance of evil.”

— Joan D. Chittister

11. “Our role in life is to bring the light of our own souls to the dim places around us.”

— Joan D. Chittister

12. “Hospitality is the key to new ideas, new friends, new possibilities. What we take into our lives changes us. Without new people and new ideas, we are imprisoned inside ourselves.”

— Joan D. Chittister

13. “Hope is not a matter of waiting for things outside of us to get better. It is about getting better inside about what is going on outside.”

— Joan D. Chittister

14. “The moment a woman comes home to herself, the moment she knows that she has become a person of influence, an artist of her life, a sculptor of her universe, a person with rights and responsibilities who is respected and recognized, the resurrection of the world begins.”

— Joan D. Chittister

15. “Everything we do seeds the future. No action is an empty one.”

— Joan D. Chittister

16. “A life of value is not a series of great things well done; it is a series of small things consciously done.”

— Joan D. Chittister

17. “To be a presence of perpetual thanksgiving may be the ultimate goal of life. The thankful person is the one for whom life is simply one long exercise in the sacred.”

— Joan D. Chittister

18. “Life is not meant to be a burden. Life is not a problem to be solved. It is a blessing to be celebrated.”

— Joan D. Chittister

19. “Benedictine spirituality is a consistent one: live life normally, live life thouhtfully, live life profouncly, live life well. Never neglect and never exaggerate. It is a lesson that a world full of cults and fads and workaholics and short courses in difficult subjects needs dearly to learn.”

— Joan D. Chittister

20. “I begin to understand as never before that holiness is made of dailiness, of living life as it comes to me, not as I insist it be.”

— Joan D. Chittister

21. “June is the time for being in the world in new ways, for throwing off the cold and dark spots of life.”

— Joan D. Chittister

22. “Fear is not the opposite of courage. Fear is the catalyst of courage.”

— Joan D. Chittister

23. “It is in community that we come to see God in the other. It is in community that we see our own emptiness filled up. It is community that calls me beyond the pinched horizons of my own life, my own country, my own race, and gives me the gifts I do not have within me.”

— Joan D. Chittister

24. “Prophets are those who take life as it is and expand it. They refuse to shrink a vision of tomorrow to the boundaries of yesterday.”

— Joan D. Chittister

25. “The time is now. The time is for reflection on what we’ve lost in life, yes, but for what we have left in life too. It’s time to begin to live life fuller rather than faster.”

— Joan D. Chittister

26. “When souls really touch, it is forever. Then space and time disappear, and all that remains is the consciousness that we are not alone in life.”

— Joan D. Chittister

27. “Imagine how happy, how holy, life would be if we ever really learn to see beauty.”

— Joan D. Chittister

28. “Superficial people are those who simply go along without a question in the world-asking nothing, troubled by nothing, examining nothing. Whatever people around them do, they do, too. That’s a sad and plastic life-routine and comfortable, maybe, but still sad.”

— Joan D. Chittister

29. “The Christmas season is a gift in itself. It releases us from the priorities of ordinary time and gives us the right to party more and pray more and love more.”

— Joan D. Chittister

30. “Beware the religion that turns you against another one. It’s unlikely that it’s really religion at all.”

— Joan D. Chittister

31. “The kind of “blind obedience” once theologized as the ultimate step to holiness, is itself blind. It blinds a person to the insights and foresight and moral perspective of anyone other than an authority figure.”

— Joan D. Chittister

32. “But we are here to depart from this world as finished as we can possibly become.”

— Joan D. Chittister

33. “Longing is a compass that guides us through life. We may never get what we really want, that’s true, but every step along the way will be determined by it.”

— Joan D. Chittister

34. “Compassion makes no distinction between friends and enemies, neighbors and outsiders, compatriots and foreigners. Compassion is the gate to human community.”

— Joan D. Chittister

35. “Learning to celebrate joy is one of the great practices of the spiritual life.”

— Joan D. Chittister

36. “Precisely because of the greatness of God, we don’t have to be great at all. Just in awe.”

— Joan D. Chittister

37. “Indeed, the big decisions in life are hardly ever clear – except for one. And that one is piercingly clear: life is a series of dilemmas, of options, of conundrums, of possibilities taken and not taken. Negotiating these moments well is of the essence of the life well lived.”

— Joan D. Chittister

38. “War within ourselves is always a prelude to war outside ourselves. All war starts within our own hearts. When our egos are inflated or our desires insatiable, we go to war with the other for the sad joy of maintaining our one-dimensional worlds.”

— Joan D. Chittister

39. “A hard heart makes for hard judgments; a compassionate heart understands the humanity of the one we presume to judge.”

— Joan D. Chittister

40. “In our dreams lies our unfinished work for the world.”

— Joan D. Chittister

41. “Awareness of the sacred in life is what holds our world together, and the lack of awareness of the sacred is what is tearing it apart.”

— Joan D. Chittister

42. “There is always new life trying to emerge in each of us. Too often we ignore the signs of resurrection and cling to part of life that have died for us.”

— Joan D. Chittister

43. “It is what we do routinely, not what we do rarely, that delineates the character of a person.”

— Joan D. Chittister

44. “Stability of heart – commitment to the life of the soul, faithfulness to the community, perseverance in the search for God – is the mooring that holds us fast when the night of the soul is at its deepest dark, and the noontime sun sears the spirit. When.”

— Joan D. Chittister

45. “The question is not, do we go to church; the question is, have we been converted. The crux of Christianity is not whether or not we give donations to popular charities but whether or not we are really committed to the poor.”

— Joan D. Chittister

46. “We are living in a period of commerical globalization. What we really need is spiritual globalization.”

— Joan D. Chittister

47. “The message we have internalized is clear – we are what we do and what we own, not what we are inside ourselves. Where it counts!”

— Joan D. Chittister

48. “Beauty scatters the seeds of hope in us.”

— Joan D. Chittister

49. “To be contemplative we must remove the clutter from our lives, surround ourselves with beauty, and consciously, relentlessly, persistently, give clutter away until the tiny world for which we ourselves are responsible begins to reflect the raw beauty that is God.”

— Joan D. Chittister

50. “Too many times we insist on loving people the way we want to love them instead of the way they need to be loved.”

— Joan D. Chittister