Here's a Great Quote

Here's a Great Quote!

“A very wise quote is a spectacular waterfall! When you see it, you feel its power!”

Mehmet Murat Ildan, Turkish author

Who does not love a good quote!? Quotes are one of things I love to see on Facebook and Instagram. Sometimes they are just funny and other times they are so insightful. And quotes by the Saints - wow! Honestly, I think one really good Saint quote can become a mantra for life.

Quotes are such an easy yet powerful way to evangelize!!

In this blog post I'm going to give you a few tips for finding and sharing quotes both with your congregation and your broader online community.

Step 1 - Find a Great Quote

Google makes it so easy to find really good quotes in only a few minutes. Here are few ideas of categories you can turn to:

• The week's readings, especially the Sunday readings.

• The Saint of the day.

• The particular season we are in - Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Ordinary Time or Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter.

• The Month we are in - the month of Mary, back to school, etc.

• The Eucharist

I usually type into Google something like quotes by St Kolbe, saint quotes about the Eucharist or Catholic quotes about fall.

Step 2 - Make Your Quote Look Pretty

Next, you want to log into Canva to make the quote look pretty for social media. I generally type in quote for Facebook and then choose the template I like.

There are essentially four possibilities:

1. A template that uses a photo as the background.

2. A template that highlights a photo or painting of a saint.

3. A template that has graphics or drawings.

4. A template that is fairly stark, for instance a simple white background with black text.

Any and all of these layouts can be very effective. Below are examples that I have created using Canva.

Photo as the background

I started with one of the free templates in Canva that I thought would work with this quote by Saint John Paul II. I then uploaded a photo I took on my recent trip to the Rockies (now part of my personal stock photo library.) I kept the fonts and colors Canva had used. I'm still debating whether the white shows up?!

Painting of a Saint

Today, May 6th, is the feast day of Saint François de Laval, who oversaw all of New France (which stretched to the Gulf Coast of Mexico) from 1658 to 1674. He was a very important figure in the Quebec church. The only thing I changed on the Canva template was to replace the photo with a painting of St. François (which is in the public domain), and changed the colors of the fonts to something that matched the painting.

Simple Graphics

Again I started with a free Canva template and just added the quote and the saint who said it. I could have included either a photo of Mary or of little children but I wanted to make the quote really stand out so I chose a simple template with just a few flowers. Easy Peasy!

Basic Black & White

I chose a basic Canva template of a quote for Facebook. I removed the colorful background because I wanted white with black text only. As you can see this can be just as effective as the other three.

Now it's time for you to get creating. You got this! 👍

Bonus Tip

Quotes are a great filler for your parish bulletin. And if you use a different font and a larger size it helps to break up a text heavy bulletin. Quotes are also an interesting and easy thing to post to X if your parish or pastor has an X account. It's fast, simple and may get X users thinking!

See ya soon! 👋