Christianity, unlike any other religion in the world, begins with catastrophe and defeat. Sunshine religions and psychological inspirations collapse in calamity and wither in adversity. But the Life of the Founder of Christianity, having begun with the Cross, ends with the empty tomb and victory.
What is discovered may be abused, but that does not mean the discovery was evil.
The family tree of earthly ancestors was really not important; what was important was the family tree of the children of God He planted on Calvary.
God has given different gifts for different people. There is no basis for feeling inferior to another who has a different gift. Once it is realised that we shall be judged by the gift we have received, rather than the gift we have not, one is completely delivered from a false sense of inferiority.
The physicist takes water, abstracts its quantitatively measurable aspects, reaches results about these aspects, and ignores the rest.
There are two ways of knowing how good God is: one is never to lose Him, and the other is to lose Him and then to find Him.
Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.
A Catholic may sin and sin as badly as anyone else, but no genuine Catholic ever denies he is a sinner. A Catholic wants his sins forgiven – not excused or sublimated.
Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them.
In every friendship hearts grow and entwine themselves together, so that the two hearts seem to make only one heart with only a common thought. That is why separation is so painful; it is not so much two hearts separating, but one being torn asunder.
If you do not live what you believe, you will end up believing what you live.
Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.
Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.
Believe the incredible and you can do the impossible.
Love is a mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery.
I feel it is time that I also pay tribute to my four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
The greatest love story of all time is contained in a tiny white Host.
All badness is spoiled goodness. A bad apple is a good apple that became rotten. Because evil has no capital of its own, it is a parasite that feeds on goodness.
Leisure is a form of silence, not noiselessness. It is the silence of contemplation such as occurs when we let our minds rest on a rosebud, a child at play, a Divine mystery, or a waterfall.
There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.