Happy are You Poor Quotes

“The value of negative things derives, must derive, from something positive, something they make possible.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“The worldling will not face his colossal inner blah.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“There is something ill about a person who makes a surrender of the great human good of married love and then fixes his heart on mere things. Or to put the same idea a bit differently, it is abnormal to give up a dearly loved human person and then attach one’s heart to subpersons. A healthy man or woman gives up married love only because he has found another and greater love.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“The main problem in developing a deep prayer life is by far the failure to live the radicality of the Gospel, hour by hour and day by day.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“Down in the human spirit there is a center that opens on to infinity... Our deepest hungers are not for food and drink, not for amusements and recreations, not for property and wardrobes, not for notoriety and gossip. We hunger for truth, we thirst to drink beauty, we yearn to celebrate, we seek to delight, we stretch out to love and be loved. That is why anything less than everything is not enough.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“Talk is cheap; lived example is not.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“If we wonder why, despite millions of us who follow Christ, the world has not long ago been converted, we need not look far for one solution. We are not perceived as men on fire. We look too much like everyone else. We appear to be compromisers, people who say that they believe in everlasting life but actually live as though this life is the only one we have”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“To be credible in our modern age a person must visibly demonstrate personal integrity in the small details of everyday life”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“Actions are costly, and the saints abound in them. Without action, our faith is dead.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“Yes, words are cheap, and many of us abound in them. Saints are quite the opposite: they say little, do much.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“We human beings tend to equate our level of to be with our level of to have. The more we possess, the more we are -- in our own minds.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“If I am filled with myself, married to my own ideas and ways of doin things, convinced that somehow I am the hub of the universe, there is of course no room in me for being filled with God, for accepting or even desiring his wisdom, for making him my center of gravity. Indeed, sensitivity to the divine is dependent on humility”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“Every fiber of our being, heart, soul, and mind, is to become wholly love (Lk 10:27). People in love are not much concerned with things. They are person oriented, not thing centered. A consumerist is not in love”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“attaining ultimate truth requires conversion of mind and heart”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“By what standards do I determine what is necessary? 2. Do I collect unneeded things? Do I hoard possessions? 3. May I, on Gospel principles, buy clothes at the dictates of fashion designers in Paris and New York? Am I slave to fashion? Do I live in other peoples’ minds? Why really do I have all the clothes I have: shirts, blouses, suits, dresses, shoes, gloves? 4. Am I an inveterate nibbler? Do I eat because I am bored? Do the weight charts convict me of superfluity in eating and drinking? Do I take second helpings simply for the pleasure they afford? 5. Do I keep unneeded books and papers and periodicals and notes? 6. Do I retain two or three identical items (clocks, watches, scarves) of which I really need only one? 7. Do I spend money on trinkets and unnecessary conveniences? 8. In the winter, do we keep our thermostat at a setting higher than health experts advise: 68 degrees? 9. When I think of my needs, do I also think of the far more drastic needs of the teeming millions in the third world? 10. Do I need the traveling I do more than the poor need food and clothing and medical care? 11. Am I right in contributing to the billions of dollars spent each year on cosmetics? How much of this can be called necessary? 12. Is smoking necessary for me? 13. Is drinking necessary for me? 14. Do I need to examine exactly what I mean by saying to myself, “I need this”? 15. Can I honestly say that all I use or possess is used or possessed for the glory of God (1 Cor 10:31)? Would he be given more glory by some other use? 16. Do I in the pauline sense “mind the things above, not those on earth” (Col 3:1-2)?”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“We have here perhaps the most radical reason why people differ so much in their opinions about what is necessary and what is superfluous, what is luxury and what is not. We differ in our life goals. If I have chosen pleasure and prestige as my overriding goals in life, I am going to differ immensely from you, who are profoundly convinced that immersion in God is your top priority. Saints were and are of one mind as to what is superfluous because they were and are of one mind about goals. If”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“In any event wardrobes are expanded because clothes become ends, as though we were made to live in the minds of others: “Won’t they think I am gorgeous when they see me in this stunning outfit?” We desire travel and television not simply as aids to our genuine destiny. We transform them into the destiny itself, as though we were made for nothing but new sights and new excitements.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“Pleasure springs from things, for it is a surface phenomenon. Joy springs from beauty and goodness; it is deep in origin and cause and effect.
[Joy] begins on earth and lives through eternity. It never leads to satiety or to disgust...the more joy, the greater is one's health as a person.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“One who seeks what he does not need is devoid of the pure delight God reserves for those who seek him undividedly...The pursuer of superfluity quite completely lacks the fulfilling joy and the rest that Jesus promises to the burdened who come to him.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“Having wealth is damaging to the pursuit of the kingdom because the very having does something to one's inner life, one's very ability to love God for his own goodness and others in and for him.”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom

“we then must ask: Who are the brothers and sisters? Are they the people in this block or rural area? Or are they everyone in this city . . . or this state . . . or this nation? Or in our global village, would our neighbors include the third and fourth worlds as well as the first and second? If one answers yes to this last question, how could he possibly get norms for poverty when there are such vast differences among the four worlds?”
― Thomas Dubay, Happy are You Poor: The Simple Life and Spiritual Freedom