Chiara Lubich

If each one of us is different, then we can each be a gift for others, thus being ourselves and fulfilling God’s plan.

“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, (Eph 4:4).
“If unity is so important to Christians, it stands to reason that nothing is more opposed to their vocation than the failure to be united.”

I believe that Christmas never goes out of date because it is a mystery that is profoundly human as it is divine.

Nothing good, nothing useful, nothing fruitful can be achieved in the world without accepting the effort and embracing suffering; in a word, without the cross.

Committing oneself at all times to live mutual love, to build peace and to promote solidarity is not something to be taken lightly! It calls for courage and knowing how to suffer.

Nothing good, useful or fruitful can be done in the world without knowing and accepting hardship and suffering—in a word, without the Cross. It’s not easy to be committed to living and bringing peace! It takes courage; it takes knowing how to suffer.

Today I’ll be careful not to judge, and to give the measure that I would wish upon myself one day.

Striving for holiness means focusing all our attention, all our efforts into loving those around us. For us, to seek holiness doesn’t consist so much in getting rid of our defects one by one, but in loving and thinking of others we completely forget ourselves.

Jesus Forsaken is the one who is “forgotten” by heaven and by earth. We must forget ourselves. But for us to do this we must remember Him in our neighbours, in His will.

This is the characteristic of the political dimension of being citizens: the constant relationship with others, the acknowledgement of their being distinct from me, but, at the same time, the conviction that both of us belong to the city.

These are times in which all peoples must cross their own borders and look beyond. The time has come when other people’s countries should be loved as our own, when our way of seeing has to acquire a new purity.

You don’t always think of yourself as being a most precious creature: the object of God’s love.

Those close to me have been created as a gift to me, and I have been created as a gift to them. On earth, everything is in a relationship of love with everything else; each thing with all other things. But we must experience Love in order to discover the golden thread that exists between human beings.