QUOTATION: Hope

Hope is practiced through the virtue of patience, which continues to do good even in the face of apparent failure, and through the virtue of humility, which accepts God’s mystery and trusts him even at times of darkness.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 39

QUOTATION: Patience

I say to you, then, in your pains, in your dryness, in your weakness, in all that springs from the old man, and in all kinds of trials, have patience even with God, have pity on your own soul.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: God's Patience

Is not God patience itself toward souls, toward you? Does He become infuriated and violently dash things to pieces? No. He awaits the fruit of His seed years and years. He daily does the little that our cooperation permits Him to do. He recommences what our faults have demolished. He is the grace itself of patience and our model.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: Jesus' Patience is the Glory of the Father

Our Lord never so much glorified His Father as in His failures among men, and by bearing with patience the imperfections, the coarseness, and the weakness of His Apostles; by His patience in awaiting the will and the hour of His Father in order to act; by His patience in succeeding only in the measure that His Father willed during His public life; and by His patience in His Passion, in which He consented to go through, what would naturally annihilate His work forever.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: Patience

If you behold God in the neighbor, you will put up with his defects, you will reprove him without sharpness, you will treat him as you would have treated Jesus Christ going to Calvary laden with His Cross; you will pity his misery, and it will not irritate you; you will patiently and kindly render him service, and for all this you must love God in him.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: The Value of Patience as Penance

How fortunate we are to be able to exchange a never-ending and unprofitable punishment for a temporary and rewarding one just by bearing our cross with patience! How many of our debts are still unpaid! How many sins have we committed which, despite a sincere confession and heartfelt contrition, will have to be atoned for in purgatory for many years, simply because in this world we contented ourselves with a few slight penances! Ah, let us settle our debts with good grace in this life by cheerfully carrying our cross. In the next, a strict account is demanded down to the last penny, to the last idle word. If we were able to snatch from the devil the book of death in which he has entered all our sins and the punishment due to them, what a heavy debt we should find, and how delighted we should be to suffer for long years on earth rather than a single day in the world to come!

--St. Louis de Montfort, Letter to the Friends of the Cross

QUOTATION: Patience

The best way to become patient is to put up with others.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Patience

If we are to be patient with others, we must be equally so with ourselves.

--St Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Patience

All comes at the proper time to him who knows how to wait.

--St. Vincent de Paul

QUOTATION: Patience with Sinners

Therefore, an upright and devout man ought to bear with patience the malice of those whom he seeks to make good, in order to increase the number of the good rather than to add himself to the number of the bad.

--St. Augustine, Letters to Marcellinus

QUOTATION: Suffering

We must suffer,and all must suffer; be they just, or be they sinners, each one must carry his cross.  He that carries it with patience is saved; he that carries it with impatience is lost.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Holy Eucharist

QUOTATION: Patience

He who suffers in patience, suffers less and saves his soul. He who suffers impatiently, suffers more and loses his soul.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori

QUOTATION: Patience in Prayer

We should not bear it with bad grace if the answer to our prayer is long delayed. Rather, let us, because of this, show great patience and resignation. For He delays for this reason: that we may offer Him a fitting occasion of honoring us through His divine providence.

-- St. John Chrysostom

QUOTATION: The Righteous Man

Nothing distinguishes the unrighteous from the righteous more than this: that in affliction, the unrighteous man impatiently complains and blasphemes. In contrast, the righteous man is proved by his patience.

--St. Cyprian of Carthage

QUOTATION: Suffering

If there be a true way that leads to the Everlasting Kingdom, it is most certainly that of suffering, patiently endured.

--St. Colette

QUOTATION: Adversity

Do not reason about afflictions and contradictions, but receive them with patience and sweetness, feeling that it is enough to know that they come from the hand of God.

--St. Francis de Sales