Daily Inspiration Quote by Henri de Lubac

Habit is usually sold as virtue: the tidy machinery that keeps a life from falling apart. De Lubac flips that piety into a warning. The line works because it refuses to comfort. "Unbelievable power" sounds almost like praise, then the verb pair lands like a gavel: "waste and destroy". Not merely dull, not merely time-consuming - spiritually corrosive.

As a cleric writing in a century that saw institutional collapse and institutional stubbornness, de Lubac is aiming at more than self-help. The intent is diagnostic: routine can become a counterfeit of fidelity. In religious life especially, repetition is the point - prayers, liturgies, disciplines. His subtext is that the same repetition can quietly evacuate meaning. You can keep the form and lose the fire, and because the form still runs, no alarm goes off. Habit becomes a sedative that lets you mistake motion for conversion.

"Waste" and "destroy" are carefully stacked. Waste is slow, almost polite: the gradual leaking away of attention, mercy, courage. Destroy is the final result: a person or institution that has preserved its schedule while hollowing out its purpose. That escalator effect is the real menace; routine doesn't announce itself as the enemy. It shows up as efficiency, respectability, even devotion.

Context matters: de Lubac spent years battling rigid, automatic thinking inside the Church, and later helped shape a reforming Catholic imagination. This sentence reads like a pocket-sized manifesto for vigilance: if you don't periodically interrogate your rituals, they will interrogate - and remake - you.