Lent Inspirational Quotes

God is not interested in your art but, your heart.

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

Festina Lente!!! (Make Haste, Slowly!!

Time didn’t heal my heal wounds but it lent me perspective. My vision was no longer clouded and I saw what I’d become. I’d let inspiration become obsession. Tunnel vision had hindered all progress. I was so fixated on you, I got stuck.

Epicureanism was a philosophy that brought peace and quiet rather than inspiration and exhilaration; based on a theory of the exclusive validity of sense perception and on an ethical doctrine that pleasure was the criterion of the good, it lent itself not only to a dull and flat dialectic but also to gross misinterpretation. Although,

[I]n other words, we should live with due knowledge of the course of things in the world. For whenever a man in any way loses self-control, or is struck down by a misfortune, grows angry, or loses heart, he shows in this way that he finds things different from what he expected, and consequently that he laboured under a mistake, did not know the world and life, did not know how at every step the will of the individual is crossed and thwarted by the chance of inanimate nature, by contrary aims and intentions, even by the malice inspired in others. Therefore either he has not used his reason to arrive at a general knowledge of this characteristic of life, or he lacks the power of judgement, when he does not again recognize in the particular what he knows in general, and when he is therefore surprised by it and loses his self-control. Thus every keen pleasure is an error, an illusion, since no attained wish can permanently satisfy, and also because every possession and every happiness is only lent by chance for an indefinite time, and can therefore be demanded back in the next hour. Thus both originate from defective knowledge. Therefore the wise man always holds himself aloof from jubilation and sorrow, and no event disturbs his ἀταραξία [ataraxia]." —from_The World as Will and Representation_. Translated from the German by E. F. J. Paye in two volumes: volume I, p. 88

When shame overwhelms us, grace still surrounds us.

Love revealed, love laid down, love spent.

Chaque âge a ses plaisirs, son esprit et ses mœurs. Un jeune homme, toujours bouillant dans ses caprices, Est prompt à recevoir l'impression des vices ; Est vain dans ses discours, volage en ses désirs, Rétif à la censure et fou dans les plaisirs. L'âge viril, plus mûr, inspire un air plus sage, Se pousse auprès des grands, s'intrigue, se ménage, Contre les coups du sort songe à se maintenir, Et loin dans le présent regarde l'avenir. La vieillesse chagrine incessamment amasse ; Garde, non pas pour soi, les trésors qu'elle entasse ; Marche en tous ses desseins d'un pas lent et glacé ; Toujours plaint le présent et vante le passé ; Inhabile aux plaisirs, dont la jeunesse abuse, Blâme en eux les douceurs que l'âge lui refuse.

Your body is the form lent to you by heaven and earth. Your life is not your possession, it is the harmony temporarily granted to you by heaven and earth. Your life destiny is not your possession, it is a flow granted to you temporarily by heaven and earth. Your children and grandchildren are not your possessions, heaven and earth have lent them to you to be cast off as an insect sheds its skin.

Of course the most valuable discoveries were kept secret as far as possible. But once you started a sort of research in the field of coal-mining, a study of methods and means, a study of by-products and the chemical possibilities of coal, it was astounding the ingenuity and the almost uncanny cleverness of the modern technical mind, as if really the devil himself had lent fiend's wits to the technical scientists of industry. It was far more interesting than art, than literature, poor emotional half-witted stuff, was this technical science of industry. In this field, men were like gods, or demons, inspired to discoveries, and fighting to carry them out. In this activity, men were beyond any mental age calculable.

Dat het lente werd, was een incident.

It was no mere fancy. Fancy does not remold a man in a moment. Fancy has its ups and downs, its hot minutes and-its cold. This was a steady inspiration; an enlarge¬ ment of the soul such as I had hitherto been a stranger to, and which I knew then, as plainly as I do now, would serve to make my happiness or my misery as Fortune lent her aid or passed me coldly by.

the disciples’ illusions of what Jesus could and should do with His power were shattered by the reality of what Jesus actually did with His power, and their personal illusions of commitment-unto-death were shattered by the reality of fear-inspired self-protection.

Sixth Station Veronica Wipes the Face of Jesus Veronica advances without fear, notwithstanding the opposition of the executioners, the shouts of the crowd. Men today have not the courage of this humble woman to go to Jesus Christ. They dare not fulfill their Christian duties; they are afraid to be seen going to Mass; they fear still more to appear at the confessional and to kneel at the holy table. Forgive, O my Lord, all these faults that are inspired by a cowardly human fear. O God of heaven and earth, Thou who art so good, so perfect, so powerful! Ah! if cowards have been weak enough to flee with the disciples, to deny Thee with Peter, let them be touched by the example of Veronica; let them come with her, to kneel at Thy feet and to recognize Thee as Master and God.

(Hamilton’s lifelong habit of talking sotto voce while pacing lent him an air of either inspiration or madness.)

Remember that the cross was Rome’s way of asserting its authority. Roman authorities declared that if you run afoul of our system, we will torture you to death in the most excruciating (ex cruce, from the cross) way possible and then we will leave your body to waste away and to be devoured by the beasts of the field. The threat of violence is how tyrants up and down the centuries have always asserted their authority. Might makes right. The crucified Jesus appeared to anyone who was witnessing the awful events on Calvary to be one more affirmation of this principle: Caesar always wins in the end. But when Jesus was raised from the dead through the power of the Holy Spirit, the first Christians knew that Caesar’s days were numbered. Jesus had taken the worst that the world could throw at him and he returned, alive and triumphant. They knew that the Lord of the world was no longer Caesar, but rather someone whom Caesar had killed but whom God had raised from death. This is why the risen Christ has been the inspiration for resistance movements up and down the centuries. In our own time, we saw how deftly John Paul II wielded the power of the cross in communist Poland. Though he had no nuclear weapons or tanks or mighty armies, John Paul had the power of the Resurrection, and that proved strong enough to bring down one of the most imposing empires in the history of the world. Once again, the faculty lounge interpretation of the Resurrection as a subjective event or a mere symbol is exactly what the tyrants of the world want, for it poses no real threat to them.

The seven lakes of Recolletine were named for gods, who by the time Madragore’s name had first been spoken in the land were already no more than dim memories in the minds of its people. As they made the final approach, in a carriage lent to them by Almorante, Tayven recited the sacred names. Anterity, god of war; Oolarn, god of knowledge; Nintala, the sun king; Upselter, goddess of love; Malarena, jealous goddess of the night; Rubezal, the hag of madness and inspiration; and finally, Pancanara; the celestial lady, goddess of the cycle of the universe.

He is calling us into union with him in the heart. This is why we must allow the Lord to prompt our actions with his inspiration and further them with his help. We are not making the journey of Lent on our own or from our own will. We are being led by the Lord as the Holy Spirit led Jesus out into the desert.

In 1383, the authorities in Marseille extended the isolation period to forty days, giving the quarantine its name. (The duration was a biblical touch, inspired by the forty days and forty nights of the flood in Genesis, the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness, and the forty days of Lent.)