Education lays hold of what is best in a person, but character lays hold of what is worse. It takes hold of a failing and by very skillful manipulation and training turns it into a perfection.
Remember that every science is based upon an abstraction. An abstraction is taking a point of view or looking at things under a certain aspect or from a particular angle.
Nature gives man corn but he must grind it; God gives man a will but he must make the right choices.
Help someone in distress and you lighten your own burden; the very joy of alleviating the sorrow of another is the lessening of one’s own.
No man discovers anything big if he does not make himself small.
Temptation is not a sin but playing with temptation invites sin.
The Rosary is the best therapy for these distraught, unhappy, fearful, and frustrated souls, precisely because it involves the simultaneous use of three powers: the physical, the vocal, and the spiritual, and in that order.
If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself.
The Rosary is the book of the blind.
The reason we’re bored is because we don’t love anything.
Souls generally do not fall away from Christ because of the Creed; they first have difficulty with the Commandments.
Our generosity is measured not by what we give but by what we keep.
To see a priest making his meditation before Mass does more for an altar boy’s vocation than a thousand pieces of inspirational literature.
If you do not live out your faith enthusiastically, maybe you don’t have any faith.
Much suffering in hospitals is wasted.
Satan always tempts the pure – the others are already his.
Satan stations more devils on monastery walls than in the dens of iniquity, for the latter offer no resistance.
It is easy to find truth, though it is hard to face it, and harder still to follow it.
In vocal prayer we go to God on foot. In meditation we go to God on horseback. In contemplation we go to God in a jet.
Penance does not require hair shirts today; our neighbors are hair shirts.