Matthew Kelly Quotes

We become the books we read.

Most people overestimate what they can do in a day, and underestimate what they can do in a month. We overestimate what we can do in a year, and underestimate what we can accomplish in a decade." by Matthew Kelly from the book The Long View

In fact, the more each person can remove his or her ego from the discussion and focus on the subject matter, the more fruitful the conversation will be for all involved.

The people we surround ourselves with either raise or lower our standards. They either help us to become the-best-version-of-ourselves or encourage us to become lesser versions of ourselves. We become like our friends. No man becomes great on his own. No woman becomes great on her own. The people around them help to make them great. We all need people in our lives who raise our standards, remind us of our essential purpose, and challenge us to become the-best-version-of-ourselves.

Freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want. Freedom is the strength of character to do what is good, true, noble, and right.

Who you become is infinitely more important than what you do, or what you have.

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.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body and prayer is to the soul.

The notion of freedom proclaimed by the modern world is anti-discipline. But true freedom cannot be separated from discipline.

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.

The people we surround ourselves with either raise or lower our standards. They either help us to become the best version of ourselves or encourage us to become lesser versions of ourselves. We become like our friends. No man becomes great on his own. No woman becomes great on her own. The people around them help to make them great. We all need people in our lives who raise our standards, remind us of our essential purpose, and challenge us to become the best version of ourselves.

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

Withholding love is a bit like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

Superficiality is the curse of the modern world.

We can never get enough of what we don't really need.

Never believe a promise from a man or woman who has no discipline. They have broken a thousand promises to themselves, and they break their promise for you.

If we will walk humbly with our God, He will lead us by the hand to exactly who and what we need, to those people, things, and experiences He has designed and intended for us, and this alone will be the cause of our deep fulfillment and happiness.

Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. Hope is one of those things that you can't buy, but that will be freely given to you if you ask. Hope is the one thing people cannot live without. Hope is a thing of beauty.

Whether you are sixteen or sixty, the rest of your life is ahead of you. You cannot change one moment of your past, but you can change your whole future. Now is your time.

Our lives change when our habits change.

Life is about love. It's about whom you love and whom you hurt. Life's about how you love yourself and how you hurt yourself. Life's about how you love and hurt the people close to you. Life is about how you love and hurt the people who just cross your path for a moment. Life is about love.

God does not want to control you, or stifle you, or manipulate you, or force you to do anything you don't want to do. Quite the opposite. God will let you do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it, with whomever you want to do it, and as often as you want to do it. When was the last time God stopped you from doing anything?

Let your life be guided by greatness

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.

Character is built little by little, over days, weeks, months, and years, with thousands of small and seemingly insignificant acts of discipline.

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” The question I have for you at this part of our journey together is, “What is your genius?

You can learn more in an hour of silence than you can in a year from books. —MATTHEW KELLY

We are not here to solve the problems; the problems are here to solve us.

The beauty of Catholicism is every human being's right.

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

Wherever you find excellence, you find continuous learning. They go hand in hand. Wherever you find that continuous learning is missing, you find mediocrity.

There will be times of fear and trembling. There will be times of discouragement and disillusionment. Have courage, smile, keep your chin up, laugh often, be kind to yourself, stay focused, be gracious and appreciative, think happy thoughts, and carry on regardless.

We become the stories we listen to. But perhaps the more important question is, what stories do you listen to? What stories are forming your life?

Life is about saying yes to the things that help you become the-best-version-of-yourself and no to the things that don’t.

The way we consume information leads us to think less and less about more and more. We spend much of our time fixated on secondary questions (usually related to controversial and sensational issues) and very little time exploring the primary questions about our brief stay here on earth.

Many people falsely believe that if you want to be holy, you are not allowed to enjoy life...Holiness brings us to life. It refines every human ability. Holiness doesn't dampen our emotions; it elevates them. Those who respond to God's call to holiness are the most joyful people in history. They have a richer, more abundant experience of life, and they love more deeply than most people can every imagine. They enjoy life, all of life.

Connecting with people in a powerful way is a skill that must be developed, nurtured, and practiced.

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.

The problem is that without an understanding for their meaning and purpose, most relationships quickly become little more than vehicles for the pursuit of selfish and individual goals. Disagreements then become a battle between conflicting interests, rather than a search for a mutually satisfying resolution.

Every journey to something is a journey away from something

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body and prayer is to the soul. We become the books we read. —MATTHEW KELLY

On the one hand, we all want to be happy. On the other hand, we all know the things that make us happy. But we don’t do those things. Why? Simple. We are too busy. Too busy doing what? Too busy trying to be happy.

The challenge life presents to each of us is to become truly ourselves--not the self we have imagined or fantasized about, not the self that our friends want us to be, not the self our ego would have us be, but the self God has ordained us to be from before we were in our mother's womb.

For the day we accept that we have chosen to choose our choices is the day we cast off the shackles of victimhood and are set free to pursue the lives we were born to live. Learn to master the moment of decision and you will live a life uncommon.

Every disciplined effort has its own multiple reward.

The most devastating form of loneliness is not to be without friends; rather, it is to be surrounded by friends and never to be truly known.

God never goes back; he always moves forward. ... God always wants our future to be bigger than our past, and God always moves forward.

We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a week.

On the one hand, we all want to be happy. On the other hand, we all know the things that make us happy. But we don’t do those things. Why? Simple. We are too busy. Too busy doing what? Too busy trying to be happy. Matthew Kelly

part of growing to maturity, part of growing up, requires that we recognize and accept that we cannot have it all.

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.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body and prayer is to the soul. We become the books we read. Matthew Kelly

There will be tough times—there are for everyone. There will be times of fear and trembling. There will be times of discouragement and disillusionment. Have courage, smile, keep your chin up, laugh often, be kind to yourself, stay focused, be gracious and appreciative, think happy thoughts, and carry on regardless.

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.

our lives is almost always a result of those things we habitually think and those things we habitually do. Life is the fruit of discipline, or lack of it. We are our habits. For example, you cannot separate Tiger

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.

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

feelings are one of the most inconsistent aspects of the human person.

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

Destruction always comes from within. It

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.

we are much more interested in developing self-expression than we are in developing selves that are worth expressing. Personal preference has triumphed over the pursuit of excellence.

I love what bestselling author, Matthew Kelly says:  “On the one hand, we all want to be happy. On the other hand, we all know the things that make us happy. But we don’t do those things. Why? Simple. We are too busy. Too busy doing what? Too busy trying to be happy.” So,

Your weaknesses are the key to the unimaginable bigger future that God has envisioned for you. Your strengths are probably already bearing all the fruit they can. They will continue to bear those good fruits in your life, but at some point they will begin to plateau. Your richer, more abundant future is intimately linked to your weaknesses.

Thoughts create actions. Actions create habits. Habits create character.

God always wants our future to be bigger than our past.

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?

If you do not, you will not.

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.

Catherine of Sienna wrote, “If you are what you should be you will set the whole world on fire.

There is no better way to honor life and God than to strive to become the-best-version-of-yourself.

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

This is the will of God: that you be saints.” (1 Thessalonians 4:3)

be kind because everyone you’ll ever meet is fighting a hard battle.” Wow. What a fabulous insight.

You can learn more in an hour of silence than you can in a year from books. —MATTHEW KELLY S

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.

Consumption. And if the culture doesn't have a vision for the human person, it certainly doesn't have a vision for the family. In fact, the culture would prefer that every family be broken, because a broken family needs two dishwashers, two lawnmowers, ant two of almost everything else. And if culture could break families up two, three, four ways, it would prefer that.

Paul was abundantly clear in 1 Thessalonians 4:3 that the very will of God is our holiness. God wants us to live holy lives, grow in character and virtue, and become the-best-version-of-ourselves.

we are reminded more than ever that we are not independent. We are interdependent. We rely on one another for the fulfillment of our legitimate needs and the satisfaction of our deepest desire. Life is not simply about the selfish pursuit of the-best-version-of-ourselves. Rather, the more we contribute to helping others become the-best-version-of-themselves, the more progress we make in the attainment

THIS YEAR CATHOLIC CHARITIES WILL PROVIDE 2.2 MILLION FREE MEALS TO THE HUNGRY AND THE NEEDY OF CHICAGO. WE DON’T ASK THEM IF THEY ARE CATHOLIC—WE JUST ASK THEM IF THEY ARE HUNGRY. REDISCOVER CATHOLICISM.

The most dominant quality among Dynamic Catholics is a daily routine of prayer. • A daily routine refers to a specific time and place set aside for prayer. Dynamic Catholics make this time a priority each day.

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

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

God loves ordinary things. The world is always trying to seduce us with the extraordinary. The culture fills our hearts and minds with spectacular dreams about hitting home runs, but life is about getting up every day and hitting a single.

The Prayer Process 1. Gratitude: Begin by thanking God in a personal dialogue for whatever you are most grateful for today. 2. Awareness: Revisit the times in the past twenty-four hours when you were and were not the-best-version-of-yourself. Talk to God about these situations and what you learned from them. 3. Significant Moments: Identify something you experienced today and explore what God might be trying to say to you through that event (or person). 4. Peace: Ask God to forgive you for any wrong you have committed (against yourself, another person, or him) and to fill you with a deep and abiding peace. 5. Freedom: Speak with God about how he is inviting you to change your life, so that you can experience the freedom to be the-best-version-of-yourself. 6. Others: Lift up to God anyone you feel called to pray for today, asking God to bless and guide them. 7. Finish by praying the Our Father.

What is a holy moment? A holy moment is a moment when you make yourself completely available to God. You set self-interest aside, you set aside what you want to do or feel like doing, and for that moment you do exactly what you sense God is calling you to do.

Addiction in all its forms, large and small, serious and less serious (no addiction is trivial), is one of the central themes of our lives. Identifying our own addictions of thought and action is part of each person’s spiritual journey. Food, control, talking too much, work, sex, pornography, alcohol, drugs, always being right, noise, negative thinking, negative humor, skepticism, cynicism, minimalism…the list is varied and endless. It doesn’t matter what it is for you, and it doesn’t matter what it is for me. What matters is how we respond.

Thomas More was widely regarded as a man of impeccable character and meticulous honesty. People trusted his judgment, and his refusal to sign sent a message to the people of England. He didn’t speak out against the acts; he simply refused to sign or say anything at all. But one honest man's silence is louder than all the words of ten thousand dishonest men.

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.

If you get the man right (or the woman, of course), you get the world right.

For the day we accept that we have chosen to choose our choices is the day we cast off the shackles of victimhood and are set free to pursue the lives we were born to live.

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.

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.

the people you will most enjoy spending time with are not those who agree with you in everything you say and tell you that you should be a little easier on yourself…and have that second slice of cheesecake! If you are dedicated to your essential purpose, the people you will want to surround yourself with are people who inspire and challenge you to become the-best-version-of-yourself. The

Individualism • The first of these practical philosophies is individualism. When most people today are faced with a decision, the question that seems to dominate their inner dialogue is, “What’s in it for me?” This question is the creed of individualism, which is based on an all-consuming concern for self. In the present climate, the most dominant trend governing the decision-making process—and therefore the formation of our

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

The following is a brief passage from the diary of Dag Hammarskjöld: “At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I’s. But in only one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one—which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I.

A very poor Greek man once applied for a job as a janitor in a bank in Athens. “Can you write?” demanded the discriminating head of employment. “Only my name,” said the fellow. He didn’t get the job—so he borrowed the money required to travel steerage to the United States and followed his dreams to the “land of opportunity.” Many years later, an important Greek businessman held a press conference in his beautiful Wall Street offices. At the conclusion, an enterprising reporter said, “One day you should write your memoirs.” The gentleman smiled. “Impossible,” he said. “I cannot write.” The reporter was astounded. “Just think,” he remarked, “how much further you would have gone if you could write.” The Greek shook his head and said, “If I could write, I’d be a janitor.

and confused if someone does not appreciate their niceness. Others often sense this and avoid giving them feedback not only, effectively blocking the nice person’s emotional growth, but preventing risks from being taken. You never know with a nice person if the relationship would survive a conflict or angry confrontation. This greatly limits the depths of intimacy. And would you really trust a nice person to back you up if confrontation were needed? 3. With nice people you never know where you really stand. The nice person allows others to accidentally oppress him. The “nice” person might be resenting you just for talking to him, because really he is needing to pee. But instead of saying so he stands there nodding and smiling, with legs tightly crossed, pretending to listen. 4. Often people in relationship with nice people turn their irritation toward themselves, because they are puzzled as to how they could be so upset with someone so nice. In intimate relationships this leads to guilt, self-hate and depression. 5. Nice people frequently keep all their anger inside until they find a safe place to dump it. This might be by screaming at a child, blowing up a federal building, or hitting a helpless, dependent mate. (Timothy McVeigh, executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, was described by acquaintances as a very, very nice guy, one who would give you the shirt off his back.) Success in keeping the anger in will often manifest as psychosomatic illnesses, including arthritis, ulcers, back problems, and heart disease. Proper Peachy Parents In my work as a psychotherapist, I have found that those who had peachy keen “Nice Parents” or proper “Rigidly Religious Parents” (as opposed to spiritual parents), are often the most stuck in chronic, lowgrade depression. They have a difficult time accessing or expressing any negative feelings towards their parents. They sometimes say to me “After all my parents did for me, seldom saying a harsh word to me, I would feel terribly guilty complaining. Besides, it would break their hearts.” Psychologist Rollo May suggested that it is less crazy-making to a child to cope with overt withdrawal or harshness than to try to understand the facade of the always-nice parent. When everyone agrees that your parents are so nice and giving, and you still feel dissatisfied, then a child may conclude that there must be something wrong with his or her ability to receive love. -§ Emotionally starving children are easier to control, well fed children don’t need to be. -§ I remember a family of fundamentalists who came to my office to help little Matthew with his anger problem. The parents wanted me to teach little Matthew how to “express his anger nicely.” Now if that is not a formula making someone crazy I do not know what would be. Another woman told me that after her stinking drunk husband tore the house up after a Christmas party, breaking most of the dishes in the kitchen, she meekly told him, “Dear, I think you need a breath mint.” Many families I work with go through great anxiety around the holidays because they are going to be forced to be with each other and are scared of resuming their covert war. They are scared that they might not keep the nice garbage can lid on, and all the rotting resentments and hopeless hurts will be exposed. In the words to the following song, artist David Wilcox explains to his parents why he will not be coming home this Thanksgiving: Covert War by David Wilcox

This, of course, gives rise to the argument of the invalidation of the Old Testament with the coming of the New, the idea being that the actions of Jesus were so antithesis to the “laws” prescribed in Exodus and Leviticus that the modern Christian should base the standards of his doctrine on the teaching of the son of their god instead. There are several large flaws with this reasoning, my favorite being the most obvious: no one does it, and if they did, what would be the point of keeping the Old Testament? How many Christian sermons have been arched around Old Testament verses, or signs waved at protests and marches bearing Leviticus 18:22, etc? Where stands the basis for the need to splash the Decalogue of Exodus in public parks and in school rooms, or the continuous reference of original sin and the holiness of the sabbath (which actually has two distinctly different definitions in the Old Testament)? A group of people as large as the Christian nation cannot possibly hope to avoid the negative reaction of Old Testament nightmares (e.g. genocide, rape, and infanticide, amongst others) by claiming it shares no part of their modern doctrine when, in actuality, it overflows with it. Secondly, one must always remember that the New Testament is in constant coherence with proving the prophecy of the Old Testament, continuously referring to: “in accordance with the prophet”, etc., etc., ad nauseum—the most important of which coming from the words of Jesus himself: “Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish but to fulfill. Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest part or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” (Matthew 5:17) And even this is hypocritical, considering how many times Jesus himself stood in the way of Mosaic law, most notably against the stoning of the woman taken by the Pharisees for adultery, the punishment of which should have resulted in her death by prophetic mandate of the Old Testament despite the guilt that Jesus inflicted upon her attackers (a story of which decent evidence has been discovered by Bart Ehrman and others suggesting that it wasn’t originally in the Gospel of John in the first place [7]). All of this, of course, is without taking into account the overwhelming pile of discrepancies that is the New Testament in whole, including the motivation for the holy family to have been in Bethlehem versus Nazareth in the first place (the census that put them there or the dream that came to Joseph urging him to flee); the first three Gospels claim that the Eucharist was invented during Passover, but the Fourth says it was well before, and his divinity is only seriously discussed in the Fourth; the fact that Herod died four years before the Current Era; the genealogy of Jesus in the line of David differs in two Gospels as does the minutiae of the Resurrection, Crucifixion, and the Anointment—on top of the fact that the Gospels were written decades after the historical Jesus died, if he lived at all.