Richard John Neuhaus Quotes

O my heart! Love God as the chatrik loves the rain drops, Who even when fountains are full and the land green, Is not satisfied as long as it cannot get a drop of rain.

Nothing is so good it lasts eternally. Perfect situations must go wrong. But this has never yet prevented me wanting far too much for far too long.

We are all born idolaters, and idolatry is good, because it is in the nature of man. Who can get beyond it? Only the perfect man, the God-man. The rest are all idolaters. So long as we see this universe before us, with its forms and shapes, we are all idolaters. This is a gigantic symbol we are worshipping. He who says he is the body is a born idolater.

We grow up hungry for love, and in ways so deep as to remain unexpressed we long for our Maker to love us.

Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other.

But I am all for love, and I am against marriage, particularly the arranged kind, because the arranged marriage gives you satisfaction. And love? - love can never satisfy you. It gives you more and more thirst for a better and better love, it makes you more and more long for it, it gives you tremendous discontentment. And that discontent is the beginning of the search for God. When love fails many times, you start looking for a new kind of lover, a new kind of love, a new quality of love. That love affair is prayer, meditation, sannyas.

At the centre of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.

Down inside we have a longing for God-what Pascal called "the vacuum which God left behind.

I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing

Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.

There is nothing on earth that can satisfy our deepest longing. We long to see God. The leaves of life are rustling with the rumor that we will - and we won't be satisfied until we do.

She says, "But in contentment I still feel The need for imperishable bliss." Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires. Is there no change of death in paradise? Does ripe fruit never fall? or do the boughs Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, With rivers like our own that seek for seas They never find, the same receding shores That never touch with inarticulate pang?

All I want is a little more than I'll ever get.

If I die, I will wait for you, do you understand? No matter how long. I will watch from beyond to make sure you live every year you have to its fullest, and then we’ll have so much to talk about when I see you again… (Bones)

Practice makes perfect. After a long time of practicing, our work will become natural, skillfull, swift, and steady.

The soul must long for God in order to be set aflame by God's love; but if the soul cannot yet feel the longing, then it must long for the longing. To long for the longing is also from God.

All things that are, are with more spirit chased than enjoyed.

What I think I've learned is that you're never going to get it all right, and you can't obsess about having a fact wrong or a date wrong or something like that, as long as you tried as best you could. If you've done the kind of research that you're sure is pretty good, then you just have to have confidence in it, so that nothing is perfect in life. I think that is what the criticism has helped me to understand.

Was there any fate more bitter than to get what you long for most, when it's too late?

I want you to know that should something happen to me, don’t worry about my body. My soul isn’t going to return to it, nor to God. It’s flying straight to you, where it knows it can find you, in Lazarevo. I want to be neither with kings nor heroes, but with the queen of Lake Ilmen.

You are born with the yearning arrow, my Glynna, though you are not yet fully aware of it. It is not a happy thing to possess, for nothing on earth - no goal, no person how ever beloved - will answer it. It points to the sky and to the heavens and the stars and when it cannot reach them, it must fall back to pierce your heart.

Is not dread of thirst when your well is full, the thirst that is unquenchable?

We all long for Eden, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most human, is still soaked with the sense of exile.

There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.