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Psalm 62:1-3
Psalm 39:1-2
Psalm 131:1-2
Matthew 11:28-30
Genesis 2:7
1 Corinthians 6:17
Psalm 46:10
“The heavens above us are more likely to go unnoticed because the skyscrapers or the billboards or the television or the computer screen before our eyes. The man-made world is firstly an inner condition, a downright soul-sickness, a delusion that begins in the human imagination. From there, “from within, out of the heart of men,” it becomes concrete; so much so that the modern secular city may well be, with its temples built in homage to commerce, the exteriorization of our civilization’s “collective soul.” Nature is pushed aside by the enormous and the sprawling, obscured by detritus and the absurdly ugly; and then, wrapped round all that, are serpentine highways congested with tiny fuming wheeled boxes; and finally come the larger domestic boxes of the suburbs and the many square miles of shopping centers pushing ever outward into the surrounding landscape far and wide.” — Addison Hodges Hart, The Yoke of Jesus: A School for the Soul in Solitude
”The mind cannot be still unless the body is still also; and the wall between them cannot be demolished without stillness and prayer.” — St. Mark the Ascetic
”It should be known, then, that God nurtures and caresses the soul, after it has been resolutely converted to His service, like a loving mother who warms her child with the heat of her bosom, nurses it with good milk and tender food, and carries and caresses it in her arms. But as the child grows older, the mother withholds her caresses and hides her tender love; she rubs bitter aloes on her sweet breast and sets the child down from her arms, letting it walk on its own feet so that it may put aside the habits of childhood and grow accustomed to greater and more important things.” — St. John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, Bk. 1, ch.1