The Restless Heart Quotes

“Anyone who deeply and honestly shares with us the struggles of her heart, her pains and fears, helps to make us more free. This is so because her story is really, in some way, our story. It is everyone’s story.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“Karl Rahner, a twentieth-century admirer of Augustine, once said that “in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we come to realize that, in this life, all symphonies must remain unfinished.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“No relationship, however deep and intimate, can ever fully take our loneliness from us. And as long as we go through life expecting this, we are doomed to constant disappointment. We also do constant violence to our friendships and love relationships because we will demand from our friends something that they cannot give us, namely, total fulfillment. For example, a goodly number of persons get married precisely because of loneliness. They see their marriage as a panacea for loneliness. After marriage, they discover that they are still lonely, sometimes as lonely as before. Immediately, there is the temptation to think that there is something seriously amiss in the marriage, to foist blame on the marriage partner or on the self, to become disenchanted and seek out new relationships, hoping of course to someday discover the rainbow of total fulfillment.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“All of us experience, to a greater or lesser extent, a loneliness that results from not having enough anchors, enough absolutes, and enough permanent roots to make us feel secure and stable in a world characterized by transience.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“But within ourselves we can experience a real difference between restlessness and solitude. What is that difference? It is the difference between living in freedom rather than compulsion; restfulness rather than restlessness; patience rather than impatience; inwardness rather than frenzied outwardness; altruism rather than greediness; authentic friendship rather than possessive clinging; and empathy rather than apathy.3”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“Being lonely does not mean that we are abnormal, love-starved, oversexed, or alienated. Perhaps all it means is that we are incurably human and sensitive to the fact that God made us for an ecstatic togetherness in a body with divine love and with all other persons of sincere will.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“Above all, such an understanding of loneliness should help liberate us. It should teach us that loneliness is both a good and a natural force in our lives.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“The canyons of our minds and hearts are so deep and so full of mystery that we try at all costs to avoid entering them deeply. We avoid journeying inward because we are too frightened: frightened because we must make that journey alone; frightened because we know it will involve solitude and perseverance; and frightened because we are entering the unknown. Aloneness, suffering, perseverance, the unknown: All these frighten us. Our own depths frighten us! And so we stall, distract ourselves, drug the pain, party and travel, stay busy, try this and that, cling to people and moments, junk up the surface of our lives, and find any and every excuse to avoid being alone and having to face ourselves. We are too frightened to travel inward. But we pay a price for that, a high one: superficiality and shallowness. So long as we avoid the painful journey inward, to the depth of our caverns, we live at the surface.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“Alienation results because human beings speak the same language only when they appear to each other as they really are, vulnerable, without impressively constructed towers. Vulnerability is that space within which human beings can truly meet each other and speak the same language. Sin and pride serve to destroy this space and drive us away from each other, leaving us to babble in our own language as we scatter to our respective corners of the earth.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“Love costs, costs everything.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“As persons, we are so constituted that in our minds, hearts, and personalities, we are insatiable, bottomless wells, capable of receiving the infinite. God made us that way so that ultimately we could be in union with infinite love and life. Because of this, there can be no fully meaningful and final solution to our loneliness outside of union with the infinite. Therefore, in this life we are always lonely.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“When a person falls out of proper harmony with God, it inevitably leads to disharmony with others.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“And so we stall, distract ourselves, drug the pain, party and travel, stay busy, try this and that, cling to people and moments, junk up the surface of our lives, and find any and every excuse to avoid being alone and having to face ourselves.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“Sometimes loneliness has led us to new heights of creativity, and sometimes it has led us to drugs, alcohol, and emotional paralysis; sometimes it has led us to the true encounter of love and authentic sexuality, sometimes it has led us into dehumanizing relationships and destructive sexuality; sometimes it has moved us to a greater depth of openness toward God and others, to fuller life, and sometimes it has led us to jump off bridges, to end life; sometimes it has given us a glimpse of heaven, sometimes it has given us a glimpse of hell; sometimes it has made the human spirit, sometimes it has broken it; always has it affected it. For loneliness is one of the deepest, most universal, and most profound experiences that we have.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“We are destined to be fully redeemed, and unlonely, only when the kingdom about which Jesus preached comes in all its completeness. In the meantime, we must give up attempting to find complete fulfillment through partial and pseudosolutions. We must face up to our loneliness, accept it, stop running from it, stop letting it propel us into all kinds of dissipating activity, and stop seeing its resolution as lying exclusively in a journey outward. As hard as that is to do, we must, at some point, stop our frenzied activities and look inward for an answer. The journey toward solitude begins with this first step.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“There can be no final solution to our loneliness in this life.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“If listened to correctly, loneliness keeps telling us the purpose for which God made us.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“Our aspirations for love and knowledge are limitless, yet our capability of fulfilling these aspirations is always limited, no matter how good a situation we are in. For this reason we are, this side of heaven, always somewhat lonely.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“Loneliness is simply the felt experience of our “Obediential Potency.” In our loneliness, “in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable,”18 we experience our nature, learn the reason why God had made us, and are pushed out of ourselves in order to move toward that end.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“Loneliness is not, therefore, a quality inhering in an otherwise complete person. Rather it is so essential to our makeup that, viewed from a certain perspective, it can be seen to be the very constitutive element of our personality.17”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“Eventually this journey leads to a deep peace, but in the early stages it causes intolerable pain. Why? Because we have stopped using anesthetics. We have stopped numbing, drugging, distracting, and deflecting our lonely thirst. Thus, deprived of anesthetic and of the cellophane covering of superficiality, we can enter and feel fully our own depth. We face ourselves for the first time. Initially this is very painful. We begin to see ourselves as we truly are, infinite caverns, satiable only by the absolutely noncounterfeit, infinite love. We see, too, how, up to now, we have not drawn our strength and support from the infinite, but have drawn on finite things. The realization that we must shift our life-support system, and the process of that shift, is very painful. It is nothing other than the pain of purgatory,15 the pain of withdrawal and the pain of birth. It is the pain of letting go of a life-support system that, however ineffectual, at least we could understand, and instead, in darkness, altruism, and hope, of moving out and trying to find life support in the mystery of the infinite. It is a process of being born again, of having our present umbilical cord cut.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“Loneliness is God’s imprint in us, constantly telling us where we should be going.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“In a sense, all these stories make up one story, namely that of a people struggling to see the face of God, to pierce the riddle of loneliness, the mist of unreality, and to come to full meaning of life. Because it is a story of struggle, this story can shed much light on our own struggle to break out of the slavery of loneliness and to meet others and God in intimacy and love.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“When we are in touch with this memory and respect its sensitivities, then we are feeling our souls. At those times, faith, hope, and love will spring up in us and joy and tears will both flow through us pretty freely. We will be constantly stabbed by the innocence and beauty of children, and pain and gratitude will, alternately, bring us to our knees. That is what it means to be recollected, to inchoately remember, to feel the memory of God in us. That memory is what is both firing our energy and providing us a prism through which to see and understand.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“Thus we recognize goodness and truth outside of us precisely because they resonate with something that is already inside us. Things “touch our hearts” when they touch us here, and it is because we have already been touched and caressed that we seek for a soul mate, for someone to join us in this tender space.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“We all have this place, a place in the heart, where we hold all that is most precious and sacred to us. From that place our own kisses issue forth, as do our tears. It is the place we most guard from others, but the place where we would most want others to come into; the place where we are the most deeply alone and the place of intimacy; the place of innocence and the place where we are violated; the place of our compassion and the place of our rage. In that place we are holy.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“When we feel frustrated, angry, betrayed, violated, or enraged, it is in fact because our outside experience is so different from what we already hold dear inside.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“before being born, each soul is kissed by God and then goes through life always, in some dark way, remembering that kiss and measuring everything it experiences in relation to that original sweetness.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness

“Would the complaint be as frequent if, when families and religious communities actually were together, the members really were present to each other? Too frequently, I feel, the problem is that even at those times when we are physically together, sharing a meal, a holiday, or a few hours of quiet or television, our minds and hearts are elsewhere and there is no real presence to each other.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness