Top 120 Matthew Kelly Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Let your life be guided by greatness.”

— Matthew Kelly

52. “There are some questions that we all ask ourselves in different ways: Who am I? Who is God? What am I here for? What matters most? What matters least? What are my unique talents and abilities? What will my contribution be? What happens when we die?”

— Matthew Kelly

53. “The world doesn’t need another Mother Teresa. The Church doesn’t need another Francis of Assisi. The world needs you. The Church needs you.”

— Matthew Kelly

54. “Our culture places a very high premium on self-expression, but is relatively disinterested in producing “selves” that are worth expressing.”

— Matthew Kelly

55. “You will learn more from your friends than you ever will from books. Choose your friends wisely.”

— Matthew Kelly

56. “Work is not everything, but when you are doing work that doesn’t engage you or, worse yet, work that you despise, it can massively affect every other aspect of your life. It is simply impossible to create enduring happiness without finding an approach to work that allows you to thrive. Ideally this means finding work that you are passionate about, but even if you are not in your dream job – or don’t know what your dream job would be – there are ways to thrive at work.”

— Matthew Kelly

57. “Prayer is like a great love. When you start dating the silence can be awkward, but as you grow to know each other you can sit in silence for hours and just being with each other is a great comfort.”

— Matthew Kelly

58. “Knowing that death is not far off brings remarkable clarity. After that news, there is no middle ground; something is either very important or not important at all.”

— Matthew Kelly

59. “Because the actions of your life are determined by your most dominant thought.”

— Matthew Kelly

60. “Michelangelo, the great Renaissance artist and poet, knew the value, power, and need for dreams when he wrote, “The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.” Our.”

— Matthew Kelly

61. “The reason most of us fail to achieve real and sustainable change in our lives is because we focus too much on the desired outcome and not enough on the progress we are making.”

— Matthew Kelly

62. “People don’t do anything until they are inspired, but once they are inspired there is almost nothing they won’t do.”

— Matthew Kelly

63. “If you want twenty minutes of quality time with someone you love, schedule three or four hours with him or her one afternoon, and chances are, somewhere in the middle of that three or four hours you will have your twenty minutes of quality time. When.”

— Matthew Kelly

64. “Some books find us at just the right time in our lives and those books change our lives forever. I hope this is that kind of book for you.”

— Matthew Kelly

65. “When you voice your disagreement, begin by talking about what you have in common with the person you are arguing with. Too often we rush to judgment, race to argue, and overlook all the common ground we share.”

— Matthew Kelly

66. “The fundamental difference between pleasure and satisfaction is that pleasure cannot be sustained beyond the activity producing it.”

— Matthew Kelly

67. “If you give your body a choice, it will always take the easy way out. Your body lies. It tells you it cannot when it can.”

— Matthew Kelly

68. “Love is the wanting, and the having, and the choosing, and the becoming. Love is the desire to see the person we love be and become all he or she is capable of being and becoming. Love is a willingness to lay down our own personal plans, desires, and agenda for the good of the relationship. Love is delayed gratification, pleasure, and pain. Love is being able to live and thrive apart, but choosing to be together.”

— Matthew Kelly

69. “Striving humbly but heroically to live by what is good, true, and noble in the midst of – and in spite of – the modern climate.”

— Matthew Kelly

70. “Whatever change you desire for the world, create that change in your own life. You are here for a purpose. Seek it out. Hunt it down. The greatest misery is to be purposeless. The great depression of our age is not economic, but spiritual. Our spiritual poverty is rooted in our purposelessness.”

— Matthew Kelly

71. “Every time you become a-better-version-of-yourself, the con-sequences of your transformation echo throughout your family, friends, business, school, neighborhood, church, marriage, nation, and beyond to people and places in the future. It is God who does the transforming, but only to the extent that we cooperate. God’s grace is constant, never lacking. So our cooperation with God’s desire to transform us is essential; it is the variable. Are you willing to let God transform you?”

— Matthew Kelly

72. “Every disciplined effort has its own multiple reward.”

— Matthew Kelly

73. “You are not what happened to you.”

— Matthew Kelly

74. “The ability to delay gratification is intimately linked with success. You cannot succeed at anything unless you are willing and able to delay gratification.”

— Matthew Kelly

75. “Work-life balance was a mistake from the start. Because we don’t really want balance. We want satisfaction.”

— Matthew Kelly

76. “Every journey to something is a journey away from something.”

— Matthew Kelly

77. “When you stand still, you reject the struggle, and you refuse to change and grow. Ultimately, you reject fulfillment, happiness, the dance for joy and everything else that is eternally good.”

— Matthew Kelly

78. “The abuse of a good does not diminish the good of a good.”

— Matthew Kelly

79. “The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.”

— Matthew Kelly

80. “Dedicate yourself above all else to becoming the-best-version-of-yourself. It is the best thing you can do for your spouse, your children, your friends, your colleagues, your employees, your employer, your church, your nation, the human family, and yourself.”

— Matthew Kelly

81. “The message delivered with unrelenting enthusiasm by our culture is, ‘You can be happy without discipline. Do whatever you feel like doing and you will be happy!’ While the Church says, ‘You cannot be happy without discipline In fact, discipline is the path to happiness!’”

— Matthew Kelly

82. “Love is a choice, not a feeling. Feelings come and go, and if we choose to base our most important relationships on how we feel at any particular moment, we are in for a rough and rocky journey. Love is a verb, not a noun. Love is something we do, not something that happens to us.”

— Matthew Kelly

83. “Religion is not something that you or I can touch. Religion is the worship of God – therefore a matter of conscience. I alone must decide for myself and you for yourself, what we choose. For me, the religion I live and use to worship God is the Catholic religion. For me, this is my very life, my joy, and the greatest gift of God in his love for me. He could have given me no greater gift.”

— Matthew Kelly

84. “It is perhaps the result of a culture that prefers us to be passive. The passive me says: “Feed me”; “Entertain me”; “Hold me”; “Love me”; “Listen to me”; “Tell me I matter”; “Make me a priority”; “Don’t make me think too much or work too hard”; and so.”

— Matthew Kelly

85. “A priest once asked Mother Teresa if she would pray that God would give him clarity in a choice he had to make. She told him, “God may never give you clarity. All you can do is trust.”

— Matthew Kelly

86. “The world has written us off. Lots of our own Christian brothers and sisters have given up on us. But I have not given up. Not even close. And not only have I not given up, I can see the path back.”

— Matthew Kelly

87. “Destruction always comes from within. It.”

— Matthew Kelly

88. “To be truly intimate with another person, is to share every aspect of yourself with that person.”

— Matthew Kelly

89. “If you do not, you will not.”

— Matthew Kelly

90. “The first problem is we don’t believe holiness is possible. The second problem is we don’t believe we can change the world.”

— Matthew Kelly

91. “We don’t want to think about our weaknesses. We don’t want to talk about them, and we certainly don’t want anyone else to point them out. This is a classic sign of mediocrity, and this mediocrity has a firm grip on the Church and humanity at this moment in history.”

— Matthew Kelly

92. “Working halfheartedly may reap you the same financial compensation as working with all your heart and soul, but it will slowly begin to rot your heart and mind and soul. Humans were not designed for halfheartedness.”

— Matthew Kelly

93. “You don’t have to go to Mass if you can tell me the one thing that you are going to do while I am at church with all your brothers that is more important than going to church and thanking God for another week of life.”

— Matthew Kelly

94. “Quite simply, if our life of prayer is inconsistent, our ability to do or know God’s will throughout the day will have the same inconsistency.”

— Matthew Kelly

95. “1. I will proactively seek out my mission in life in these four ways: by choosing the-best-version-of-myself in each moment, by doing what I can where I am right now to help others celebrate their best selves and to make the world a better place, by exploring how my talents and passions can be put to use to serve the needs of others, and by listening to the voice of God in my life.”

— Matthew Kelly

96. “Too often in our modern culture, children are perceived as “nice to have” if you’ve got the time and the money and are prepared to suspend, or maybe even sacrifice, your career. Young couples today perceive the blessing of children not in relation to their true purpose, but rather in relation to their “quasi purpose” of financial independence.”

— Matthew Kelly

97. “The beauty of Catholicism is every human being’s right.”

— Matthew Kelly

98. “When our children know more about teen pop idols than they do about Jesus Christ, isn’t it time for us to reassess the place and priority our faith has in our lives?”

— Matthew Kelly

99. “We can never get enough of what we don’t really need.”

— Matthew Kelly

100. “If you don’t break from the tensions of daily living, they will break you.”

— Matthew Kelly