QUOTATION: Fear of Hurting Feelings

You want people to suffer forever in hell but you don't want to hurt their feelings now? What kind of love is that?

--Mother Angelica

QUOTATION: Sentiments Are Not a Substitute for Faith

Beware lest your religion be one of sentiment merely, not of practice. Men may speak in a high imaginative way of the ancient Saints and the Holy Apostolic Church, without making the fervour or refinement of their devotion bear upon their conduct. Many a man likes to be religious in graceful language; he loves religious tales and hymns, yet is never the better Christian for all this. The works of every day, these are the tests of our glorious contemplations, whether or not they shall be available to our salvation; and he who does one deed of obedience for Christ's sake, let him have no imagination and no fine feeling, is a better man, and returns to his home justified rather than the most eloquent speaker, and the most sensitive hearer, of the glory of the Gospel, if such men do not practice up to their knowledge.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, “Forms of Private Prayer”, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 1.

QUOTATION: Moderns

We talk, by a sort of habit, about Modern Thought, forgetting the familiar fact that moderns do not think. They only feel, and that is why they are so much stronger in fiction than in facts, why their novels are so much better than their newspapers. The current comment on all these things is … the queerest sort of patchwork of pagan and purely Christian ideas.

--G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 1930

QUOTATION: Spiritual Dryness

Sometimes we experience a terrible dryness in our spiritual life. We feel no desire to pray, don’t experience God’s presence, get bored with worship services, and even think that everything we have ever believed about God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is little more than a childhood fairy tale.

Then it is important to realize that most of these feelings and thoughts are just feelings and thoughts, and that the Spirit of God dwells beyond our feelings and thoughts. It is a great grace to be able to experience God’s presence in our feelings and thoughts, but when we don’t, it does not mean that God is absent. It often means that God is calling us to a greater faithfulness. It is precisely in those times of spiritual dryness that we must hold on to our spiritual discipline so that we can grow into new intimacy with God.

--Fr. Henri Nouwen

QUOTATION: Feelings

Don't bother too much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them; when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behaviour.

--C.S. Lewis

QUOTATION: The Necessity of Faith

That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods "where they get off," you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity