Feast of Christ the King

Pilate therefore said to him: Art thou a king then? Jesus answered: Thou sayest that I am a king. For this was I born, and for this came I into the world, that I should give testimony to the truth. Every one that is of the truth, heareth my voice.
--Saint John, Ch.13, v.37 

A good eye

Every creature in the world will raise our hearts to God if we look upon it with a good eye.

--Saint Felix of Cantalice

A day

A day! It has risen upon us from the great deep of eternity, girt round with wonder; emerging from the womb of darkness; a new creation of life and light spoken into being by the word of God.
--E. H. Chapin

Grace

You say grace before meals.  All right.  But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink. 
--G.K. Chesterton

Gratitude

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder. 
--G.K. Chesterton

(Thank you, dear friends, for your very nice comments and especially for your prayers. Though I have not responded for a while now, please know that I am most grateful for each and every word. May Almighty God bless you all.) 

Kindness

Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness. 
--Seneca

Feast of the Forty Martyr-Saints of England and Wales

All ye holy martyrs, pray for us!
(And please pray especially for my son.)

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to watch till her mouth can
Enrich the smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
--W. H. Davies

Learn to love

"You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working, and just so, you learn to love by loving. All those who think to learn in any other way deceive themselves."

--St. Francis de Sales

Beginning

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

--Seneca

Listen

“Listen and attend with the ear of your heart.”

--Saint Benedict

A long way

One may go a long way after one is tired.  

--French Proverb

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us.

Friends

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.  

~Epicurus

Down the road

“God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.”
--Isak Dinesen

Experience

"To reach something good it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus to have acquired experience."
--Saint Teresa of Avila

Holiness

"Holiness consists in a disposition of the heart, which places us in the arms of God, little and humble, conscious of our weakness and trusting blindly in His Fatherly goodness."
--Saint Therese of Lisieux
Saint Andre Bessette, pray for us!

Friendship

“Friendship consists in forgetting what one gives, and remembering what one receives”

--Alexandre Dumas

Love alone

“It is love alone that gives worth to all things.”

--Saint Teresa of Avila
Saint Teresa, pray for us.

Music amongst the trees

“There is always music amongst the trees in the garden, but our hearts must be very quiet to hear it.”

 

--Minnie Aumonier

Our Lady of Fatima

“The Lord told us that the Church will always be suffering in various ways, up to the end of the world. The important point is that the message, the answer of Fatima, is not substantially addressed to particular devotions, but is the fundamental response: permanent conversion, penance, prayer, and the three cardinal virtues: faith, hope and charity.” 
--Pope Benedict XVI at Fatima, 2010

Time

Think not thy time short in this world, since the world itself is not long. The created world is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition, for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it and may be after it.
--Sir Thomas Browne

The Divine Maternity of Our Lady

Love is sufficient of itself; it gives pleasure by itself and because of itself.
It is its own merit, its own reward. Love looks for no cause outside itself, no
effect beyond itself. Its profit lies in the practice. Of all the movements,
sensations and feelings of the soul, love is the only one in which the creature
can respond to the Creator and make some sort of similar return however unequal
though it be. For when God loves, all He desires is to be loved in return. The
sole purpose of His love is to be loved, in the knowledge that those who love
Him are made happy by their love of Him.
-- Saint Bernard of Clairvaux 

Beautiful

“It is with the smallest brushes that the artist paints the most exquisitely beautiful pictures.” 

-- Blessed André Bessette, soon to be canonized.

Love

We must begin with love, continue with love, and end with love."

--Saint Francis de Sales

If we love God...

If we love God and are faithful to Him, we shall be at peace, and this peace
shall endure.

 --St. Madeleine Sophie Barat
 

The rosary

"The rosary is the book of the blind, where souls see and there enact the greatest drama of love the world has ever known; it is the book of the simple, which initiates them into mysteries and knowledge more satisfying than the education of other men; it is the book of the aged, whose eyes close upon the shadow of this world, and open on the substance of the next. The power of the rosary is beyond description."

-- Archbishop Fulton Sheen
Our Lady, Queen of the Holy Rosary, pray for us.

Without measure

We should love God because He is God, and the measure of our love should be to
love Him without measure.

--St. Bernard

The morns are meeker

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I'll put a trinket on.
 
--Emily Dickinson
 

Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi

“Blessed is the servant who loves his brother as much when he is sick and useless as when he is well and can be of service to him. And blessed is he who loves his brother as well when he is afar off as when he is by his side, and who would say nothing behind his back he might not, in love, say before his face.”
--Saint Francis of Assisi

Saint Francis, pray for us.

Only love

Saint Therese, pray for us.

October

"The sweet calm sunshine of October, now
    Warms the low spot; upon its grassy mold
The purple oak-leaf falls; the birchen bough
    drops its bright spoil like arrow-heads of gold."

 --William Cullen Bryant