Make friends for yourself now by honoring the saints of God, by imitating their actions, so that when you depart this life they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.
The living experience of the saints is there to encourage us. They gave themselves to God without reserve, wanting only to do his will. In return they received the sense of enjoying an immense freedom, which nothing in the world could take away from them, and which was the source of intense joy. How is that possible? We can try to understand it little by little.
The sermons of the saints are their examples.
It is right, too, to seek example and inspiration from the great saints of the Church. Pure as they were, they inflicted such mortifications upon themselves as to leave us almost aghast with admiration. And as we contemplate their saintly heroism, shall not we be moved by God's grace to impose on ourselves some voluntary sufferings and deprivations, we whose consciences are perhaps weighed down by so heavy a burden of guilt?
You cannot be half a saint. You must be a whole saint or no saint at all.
Follow the saints, because those who follow them will become saints.
You say you see no reason why we should pray to the saints since God can hear us and help us just as well, and will do so gladly, as any saint in heaven. Well, then, what need, I ask, do you have to ask any physician to help your fever, or to ask and pay any surgeon to heal your sore leg? For God can both hear you and help you as well as the best of doctors, He loves you more than they do, and He can help you sooner.
All the saints have a great devotion to Our Lady.
If you consider all the saints, you will see that all of them had a devotion to the Blessed Virgin; her intercession is most powerful, she is the mother of God and the Mother of men.
Veneration ought to be shown by the faithful to the bodies of the martyrs and other saints, who live with Jesus Christ. For they were His living members and the temples of the Holy Ghost; he will raise them up again to eternal life and glory; and through them God grants many blessings to mankind.
The lives of the saints are not limited to their earthly biographies but also include their being and working in God after death. In the saints one thing becomes clear: those who draw near to God do not withdraw from men, but rather become truly close to them.
Do not be afraid to set your sights higher, to allow yourself to be loved and liberated by God. Do not be afraid to let yourself be guided by the Holy Spirit. Holiness does not make you less human, since it is an encounter between your weakness and the power of God’s grace. For in the words of León Bloy, when all is said and done, “the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint”.
Pope Francis, Gaudete et Exsultate
Don’t wait until you are old to start becoming a saint. That would be a great mistake! Begin right now, in earnest, cheerfully and joyfully, by fulfilling the duties of your work and of your everyday life. Don’t wait until you are old to become a saint. Because—I insist—apart from its being a great mistake, you never know whether you will live as long as that.
We should imitate the virtues of the saints just as they imitated Christ, for in their virtues there shines forth under different aspects the splendor of Jesus Christ.
Those who seek to perfect themselves in every aspect of virtue should look to the lives of the saints, which are like living and breathing works of art, and thus by imitation try to reproduce their virtues in their own life.
Although we are not commanded to follow the saints to the extremities where their heroic virtue leads them, nevertheless from their inaccessible heights, they still guide us along the easier paths of the plain...When the weakness of our sight would lead us to mistake false glimmerings for the truth, let us think of these friends of God.
Those in the Catholic Church, whom some rebuke for praying to saints and going on pilgrimages, do not seek any saint as their savior. Instead, they seek saints as those whom their Savior loves, and whose intercession and prayer for the seeker He will be content to hear. For his own sake, He would have those He loves honored. And when they are thus honored for His sake, then the honor that is given them for His sake overflows especially to Himself.
If Saint Paul exhorts us to pray for one another, and we gladly think it right to ask every poor man to pray for us, should we think it evil to ask the holy saints in heaven to do the same?
The first commandment does not forbid us to pray to the Saints, because if we are allowed to ask the prayers of our fellow creatures upon earth, we should be allowed also to ask the prayers of our fellow creatures in heaven. Moreover, the Saints must have an interest in our welfare, because whatever tends to make us good, tends also to the glory of God.
The saints did not all begin well, but they all ended well.
It is good and useful suppliantly to invoke the Servants of God reigning together with Christ and to venerate their relics and images; but before the others, all the faithful shall follow the Blessed Virgin Mary with filial devotion.
Each saint makes Christ's loving presence more concrete to us. By analogy, we can say that in their loving response to God they "give birth" to Christ again and again in our midst.
God would never inspire me with desires which cannot be realized; so in spite of my littleness, I can hope to be a saint.
Let the past go. The saints were always beginning. That is how they became saints.
