Interior Freedom Quotes

“No circumstance in the world can ever prevent us from believing in God, from placing all our trust in him, from loving him with our whole heart, or from loving our neighbor. Faith, hope, and charity are absolutely free, because if they are rooted in us deeply enough, they are able to draw strength from whatever opposes them! If someone sought to prevent us from believing by persecuting us, we always would retain the option of forgiving our enemies and transforming the situation of oppression into one of greater love. If someone tried to silence our faith by killing us, our deaths would be the best possible proclamation of our faith! Love, and only love, can overcome evil by good and draw good out of evil.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“Ultimately, we can really forgive people only because Christ rose from the dead; his Resurrection is the guarantee that God can cure every wrong and every hurt.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“The highest and most fruitful form of human freedom is found in accepting, even more than in dominating. We show the greatness of our freedom when we transform reality, but still more when we accept it trustingly as it is given to us day after day.
It is natural and easy to go along with pleasant situations that arise without our choosing them. It becomes a problem, obviously, when things are unpleasant, go against us, or make us suffer. But it is precisely then that, in order to become truly free, we are often called to choose to accept what we did not want, and even what we would not have wanted at any price. There is a paradoxical law of human life here: one cannot become truly free unless one accepts not always being free!
To achieve true interior freedom we must train ourselves to accept, peacefully and willingly, plenty of things that seem to contradict our freedom. This means consenting to our personal limitations, our weaknesses, our powerlessness, this or that situation that life imposes on us, and so on. We find it difficult to do this, because we feel a natural revulsion for situations we cannot control. But the fact is that the situations that really make us grow are precisely those we do not control.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“There are two things to be aware of if the fight against evil inclinations is to have any chance of success. First, our efforts will never be sufficient on their own. Only the grace of Christ can win us the victory. Therefore our chief weapons are prayer, patience, and hope. Second, one passion can only be cured by another - a misplaced love by a greater love, wrong behavior by right behavior that makes provisions for the desire underlying the wrongdoing, recognizes the conscious or unconscious needs that seek fulfillment and either offers them legitimate satisfaction or transfers them to something compatible with the person's calling.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“This is why humility, spiritual poverty, is so precious: it locates our identity securely in the one place where it will be safe from all harm. If our treasure is in God, no one can take it from us. Humility is truth. I am what I am in God’s eyes: a poor child who possesses absolutely nothing, who receives everything, infinitely loved and totally free. I have received everything in advance from the freely bestowed love of my Father, who said to me definitively: “All that is mine is yours.”5”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“Faith and hope are provisional; they exist only for this earth and will pass away. In heaven, faith will be replaced by sight, and hope by possession; only love will never pass away.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“I’m not going to spend my life denouncing sin. That would be doing it too much honor. I would rather encourage good than condemn evil.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“Resentment attacks our vital forces and does us much harm. When someone has made us suffer, our tendency is to keep the memory of the wrong alive in our minds, like a “bill” we will produce in due time to demand settlement. Those accumulated bills end up poisoning our lives. It is wiser to cancel every debt, as the Gospel invites us to. In return, we will be forgiven everything, and our hearts will be set free, whereas nurturing resentment toward others closes us to the positive things they could contribute to us.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“Christians are not people who follow a set of rules. Christians are, first and foremost, people who believe in God, hope for everything from him, and want to love him with all their hearts and to love their neighbors. The commandments, prayer, the sacraments, and all the graces that come from God (including the loftiest mystical experiences) have just one purpose: to increase our faith, hope, and love.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“True freedom is not so much something man wins for himself; it is a free gift from God, a fruit of the Holy Spirit, received in the measure in which we place ourselves in a relationship of loving dependence on our Creator and Savior. This is where the Gospel paradox is most apparent: “Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”7 In other words, people who wish to preserve and defend their own freedom at any cost will lose it, but those willing to “lose” it by leaving it trustingly in God’s hands will save it. Their freedom will be restored to them, infinitely more beautiful, infinitely deeper, as a marvelous gift from God’s tenderness. Our freedom is, in fact, proportionate to the love and childlike trust we have for our heavenly Father.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“Learning to give and receive freely requires a long, laborious process of re-educating our minds, which have been conditioned by thousands of years of struggle for survival.16 The violent entry of divine revelation and the Gospel into the world is like an evolutionary ferment, intended to make our psychology “evolve” toward an attitude of free giving and free receiving—the attitude of the Kingdom because it is the attitude of love. This is a process of divinization, whose final goal is to love as God loves: “You must be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.”17 And this divinization, this becoming God-like, means becoming human in the truest sense! It is a marvelous, liberating evolution: but we can only enter into the new way of being through the destruction of many of our natural behaviors, a sort of death-agony.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“our inability to love comes most often from our lack of faith and our lack of hope.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“Love is also a decision. Sometimes it comes spontaneously, but very often loving people will mean choosing to love them. Otherwise love would be no more than emotion, even selfishness, and not something that engages our freedom.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies. We make mental provision for the days to come, and everything turns out differently, quite differently. Sufficient unto the day. The things that have to be done must be done, and for the rest we must not allow ourselves to become infested with thousands of petty fears and worries, so many motions of no confidence in God. Everything will turn out all right … Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.13”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“The worst pain of suffering lies in rejecting it. To the pain itself we then add rebellion, resentment, and the upset this suffering arouses in us. The tension within us increases our pain. But when we have the grace to accept a suffering and consent to it, it becomes at once much less painful. “Peaceful suffering is no longer suffering,” said the Curé of Ars, St. Jean-Marie Vianney.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“El amor, aunque pobre e impotente en apariencia, siempre es fecundo y no puede no serlo porque participa del mismo ser y de la vida misma de Dios.”
― Jacques Philippe, La libertad interior

“La libertad humana posee una grandeza increíble. Gracias a ella, el hombre no tiene el poder de cambiar cuanto le rodea, pero sí que dispone (lo cual es mucho mejor) de la capacidad de otorgarle un sentido a todo, ¡incluso a lo que carece de él! Aunque no siempre seamos dueños del transcurrir de nuestra vida, sí lo somos del sentido que le damos.”
― Jacques Philippe, La libertad interior

“God is eternally present, eternally young, eternally new, and our past and future are his. He can forgive everything, purify everything, renew everything. “He will renew you in his love.”3 In the present moment, because of his infinitely merciful love, we always have the possibility of starting again, not impeded by the past, or tormented by the future.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“These certainties include fulfilling the duties of our state in life and practicing the essential points of every Christian vocation. There is a defect here that needs to be recognized and avoided: finding ourselves in darkness about God’s will on an important question—a large-scale vocational choice or some other serious decision—we spend so much time searching and doubting or getting discouraged, that we neglect things that are God’s will for us every day, like being faithful to prayer, maintaining trust in God, loving the people around us here and now. Lacking answers about the future, we should prepare to receive them by living today to the full.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“We are not always masters of the unfolding of our lives, but we can always be masters of the meaning we give them. Our freedom can transform any event in our lives into an expression of love, abandonment, trust, hope, and offering. The most important and most fruitful acts of our freedom are not those by which we transform the outside world as those by which we change our inner attitude in light of the faith that God can bring good out of everything without exception.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“There are times in every life when we find ourselves in situations of trial and difficulty, either affecting us or someone we love. We can do nothing. However much we turn things over and examine them from every angle, there is no solution. The feeling of being helpless and powerless is a painful trial, especially when it concerns someone close to us: to see someone we love in difficulties without being able to help is one of the bitterest sufferings there is.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“one passion can only be cured by another—a misplaced love by a greater love, wrong behavior by right behavior that makes provisions for the desire underlying the wrongdoing, recognizes the conscious or unconscious needs that seek fulfillment and either offers them legitimate satisfaction or transfers them to something compatible with the person’s calling.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“Disappointment in a relationship with someone from whom we were expecting a lot (perhaps too much) can teach us to go deeper in prayer, in our relationship with God, and to look to him for that fullness, that peace and security, that only his infinite love can guarantee. Disappointments in relationships with other people oblige us to pass from “idolatrous” love to a love that is realistic, free, and happy. Romantic love will always be threatened with disappointments. Charity never is, because it “does not insist on its own way”54 or seek its own interest.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“Etty Hillesum wrote: “I have gradually come to realize that on those days when you are at odds with your neighbors you are really at odds with yourself. ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’”28 Conversely, if we close our hearts against other people, make no effort to love them as they are, never learn to be reconciled with them, we will never have the grace to practice the deep reconciliation with ourselves that we all need. Instead we will be perpetual victims of our own narrow-heartedness and harsh judgments toward our neighbor.”
― Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom

“La falta de esperanza y la falta de confianza en lo que la gracia divina puede obrar en nosotros y en lo que nosotros podemos hacer con su ayuda, trae como inevitable consecuencia un estrechamiento del corazón y una mengua de la caridad. Y, por el contrario, la confianza —como dice Teresa de Lisieux— conduce al amor. El”
― Jacques Philippe, La libertad interior

“en esta tierra el amor es la participación más plena en la vida del cielo,”
― Jacques Philippe, La libertad interior

“para que nuestra voluntad sea fuerte y dispuesta, necesita verse alimentada por el deseo. Y ese deseo no puede ser poderoso si lo que se desea no se percibe como posible y accesible; porque, si nos representamos algo como inaccesible, dejamos de desearlo y quererlo con fuerza.”
― Jacques Philippe, La libertad interior

“Las imperfecciones de los otros y las decepciones que nos causan nos obligan a esforzarnos por amarlos con un amor verdadero y a establecer con ellos una relación que no se limite a la búsqueda inconsciente de satisfacer nuestras propias necesidades, sino que tienda a hacerse pura y desinteresada como el mismo amor divino: sed perfectos como vuestro Padre celestial es perfecto53.”
― Jacques Philippe, La libertad interior

“En circunstancias de prueba, a menudo nuestra necesidad de comprender lo que ocurre es simplemente la expresión de nuestra incapacidad para abandonarnos en Dios con confianza y de nuestra búsqueda de seguridad humana, es decir, algo de lo que debemos purificarnos.”
― Jacques Philippe, La libertad interior

“«De Dios obtenemos tanto como esperamos»25”
― Jacques Philippe, La libertad interior