Maximilian Kolbe Quotes

No one in the world can change Truth. What we can do and and should do is to seek truth and to serve it when we have found it. The real conflict is the inner conflict. Beyond armies of occupation and the hetacombs of extermination camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are the victories on the battlefield if we are ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves?

every fall, even if it be very grave and repeated, serves us always and only as a little step towards a higher perfection.

All grace,” says St. Maximilian Kolbe, “ultimately comes to us from God the Father, through the merits of Jesus Christ, His Son, and is distributed by the Holy Spirit; and the Holy Spirit, in distributing all grace, works in and through Mary.

25. The soul offers to the Immaculate its own acts of love not as one consigns an object to just any intermediary, but as her property, as her complete and exclusive property, since it understands that the Immaculate offers to Jesus these acts as if they were her own, which means that she offers them without stain, immaculate; Jesus, then, offers them to the Father.

In order that obedience be supernatural it must not proceed from reason, but from faith.

The Immaculate will conquer, through us, the whole world and every single soul.

Never be afraid of loving the Blessed Virgin too much. You can never love her more than Jesus did.

Sigmund Freud once asserted, "Let one attempt to expose a number of the most diverse people uniformly to hunger. With the increase of the imperative urge of hunger all individual differences will blur, and in their stead will appear the uniform expression of the one unstilled urge." Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz. There, the "individual differences" did not "blur" but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints. And today you need no longer hesitate to use the word "saints": think of Father Maximilian Kolbe who was starved and finally murdered by an injection of carbolic acid at Auschwitz and who in 1983 was canonized. You may be prone to blame for invoking examples that are the exceptions ot the rule. "Sed omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt" (but everything great is just as difficult to realize as it is rare to find) reads the last sentence of the Ethics of Spinoza. You may of course ask whether we really need to refer to "saints." Wouldn't it suffice just to refer to decent people? It is true that they form a minority . More than that, they always will remain a minority. And yet I see therein the very challenge to join the minority. For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best. So let us be alert-alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.

You are hers: Let yourself be led by the Immaculate

When the soul reflects on the fact that it has given itself to the Immaculate, and that whatever happens to it occurs by her will, it is filled with a very great peace.

Approaching directly to her heart you will attain a greater knowledge of her and be inflamed by a greater love for her than all human words together could teach you.

Our dependence on Mary is greater than we can imagine. We receive all graces, absolutely all of them, from God through the Immaculate, who is our universal mediatrix with Jesus.

14. I pray you to tell the Brothers not to be afraid at all to love the Immaculate too much since . . . they will never love her like Jesus loved her.

But grace, for ourselves and for others, is obtained by humble prayer, by mortification, and by fidelity in the accomplishment of our own ordinary duties, including the simplest ones.

A man cannot rise any higher than this. The Immaculate is the highest degree of perfection and sanctity of a creature. No man will ever attain this celestial summit of grace, for the Mother of God is unique. However, he who gives himself without limits to the Immaculate will in a short time attain a very high degree of perfection and procure for God a very great glory.

Different prayers and formulas are good and beautiful, but the essential thing . . . is the simple relationship of a child to its mother, this sense of our need for this mother, the conviction that without her we can do nothing.

Everyone cannot become a genius but the path of holiness is open to all ... It is untrue that the saints were not like us. They too experienced temptations, they fell and rose again; they experienced sorrow that weakened and paralyzed them with a sense of discouragement ... They did not trust themselves but placed all their trust in God.

One can go to Our Lord Jesus or the Most Holy Trinity directly, not excluding, however, the most holy Mother, for to tend toward God without Mary, if it is with an express exclusion of her, is pride and something diabolical, and the essence of sin is always pride, that is, non-conformity with the will of God; and the will of God is this, that we go to Him by this road, that is, through the most holy Mother.

The most holy Mother is Mediatrix of all graces without exception. . . . Therefore the life of grace of a soul depends on the degree of its closeness to her. The closer a soul approaches her, the more pure it becomes, the more lively becomes its faith. Its love becomes more beautiful, and all virtues, being the work of grace, are strengthened and vivified. We cannot seek grace anywhere else because she is its Mediatrix.

For Anne Hutchinson, who knew it was illegal for women to teach from the Bible in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but did it anyway, we give thanks. For William Wilberforce, who channeled his evangelical fervor into abolishing slavery in the British Empire, vowing “never, never will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name,”29 we give thanks. For Sojourner Truth, who proclaimed her own humanity in a culture that did not recognize it, we give thanks. For Maximilian Kolbe, the Franciscan friar who volunteered to die in the place of a Jewish stranger at Auschwitz, we give thanks. For the pastors, black and white, who linked arms with Martin Luther King Jr. and marched on Washington, we give thanks. For Rosa Parks, who kept her seat, we give thanks. For all who did the right thing even when it was hard, we give thanks.

Maximilian Kolbe (1894–1941) Dying for another Another victim of Nazi Germany, Maximilian Kolbe is one of the most remarkable saints of modern history. He was born in Poland in 1894 and became a Franciscan monk as a teenager. After being ordained a priest and serving a small parish for several years, Kolbe became the director of one of Poland’s great publishing houses. One of his journals had a circulation of 800,000. When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Kolbe worked diligently to protect many Jewish refugees. The Nazis arrested him and sent him to Auschwitz in 1941. At this notorious death camp, the priest labored to set an example of faith and hope to the other prisoners. When a prisoner escaped, the camp’s commandant ordered that ten of the inmates of cellblock 14 be selected for retaliatory punishment. The Nazis would lock them in an underground bunker until they starved to death. One of the randomly selected ten, Franciszek Gajowniczek, began to weep. “My poor wife and children! I will never see them again!” Kolbe stepped forward and offered to take his place. “I wish to die for that man. I am old; he has a wife and children.” When the deputy commandant asked him to identify himself he responded simply, “I am a Catholic priest.” The startled commandant let him take Gajowniczek’s place. As his companions began to die in slow agony, Kolbe prayed and sang hymns with them. The next month Kolbe and three others were still alive, having consumed nothing but their own urine. The Nazis gave them lethal injections and cremated them in the death camp’s ovens. In 1982, Maximilian Kolbe was canonized a saint as the surviving Franciszek Gajowniczek looked on. Today, someone continually places flowers in the bunker at Auschwitz.

The will of the Immaculate is most intimately united to the will of the Holy Ghost in such a way that it is completely identified with it.

In his final article Father Maximilian wrote: "No one in the world can alter truth. All that we can do is seek it, find it, and live it." Here he touched on a crucial point. Does not the conflict that lacerates the modern world reduce itself to a crisis of truth? All reformers would like to change the truth; but the question is simply to recognize it as it is, serve it, and love it. "No one in the world can alter truth..." These words sum up the testament of Father Maximilian. They ought to be written in flaming letters above the chapter of history which God is in the process of writing, straight and upright over the crooked lines of our treason. Is not Satan's name the Father of Lies?

If you want to grow in perfection, you cannot advance by yourselves – you need a guide. Hence, when you go to God, go through Mary and with Mary! - St. Maximilian Kolbe Prayer to Our Lady of Gentle Love Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, infuse in our hearts the love you have for Jesus, your Divine Son. Help us to understand that love and gentleness go together in our daily life. Intercede for us and bring peace and joy in our families, help our neighbors, the lonely, the sick, the homeless and the hungry. You are the Mother of all humankind, given to us by Almighty God and we turn to you for guidance. Help us to be holy, as you are holy and to love as you love. Our Lady of Gentle Love, pray for all your children. We ask you to implore for us to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, to bless us all and to help us to attain eternal salvation. Amen.

Maximilian Kolbe : (1894-1941), what an amazing life! A role model to me and to millions of people around the world. He wanted to be one of the greatest saints in the world. I want to be “A gift from God to Mankind”, the meaning of my first name : Teddy.