To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.
Dogma is the guardian of mystery. The doctrines are spiritually significant in ways that we cannot fathom.
Once the process [of conversion] is begun and continues...you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity...you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to turn away from it. I measure God by everything I am not. I begin with that.
It is hard to make your adversaries real people unless you recognize yourself in them - in which case, if you don't watch out, they cease to be adversaries.
The mind serves best when it's anchored in the Word of God. There is no danger then of becoming an intellectual without integrity.
The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, and of the saints, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world seems to be going through a dark night of the soul.
I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.
There are some of us who have to pay for our faith every step of the way and who have to work out dramatically what it would be like without it and if being without it would be ultimately possible or not.
Remember that you don't write a story because you have an idea but because you have a believable character.
Sickness is a place, ... and it's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.
...the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it.
We are not judged by what we are basically. We are judged by how hard we use what we have been given. Success means nothing to the Lord.
A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.
The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.
Your criticism sounds to me as if you have read too many critical books and are too smart in an artificial, destructive, and very limited way.
Satisfy your demand for reason but always remember that charity is beyond reason, and God can be known through charity.
We are now living in an age which doubts both fact and value. It is the life of this age that we wish to see and judge.
For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.
She could never be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.
Every morning between 9 and 12 I go to my room and sit before a piece of paper. Many times, I just sit for three hours with no ideas coming to me. But I know one thing. If an idea does come between 9 and 12 I am there ready for it.
In the first place you can be so absolutely honest and so absolutely wrong at the same time that I think it is better to be a combination of cautious and polite
If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.
Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning.
We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can't make something out of a little experience, you probably won't be able to make it out of a lot. The writer's business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.
The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: