Suppress prostitution, and capricious lusts will overthrow society.
Better to have fewer wants than greater riches to supply increasing wants.
Conscience and reputation are two things. Conscience is due to yourself, reputation to your neighbour.
It is human to err, but it is devilish to remain willfully in error.
The Devil invented gambling.
Moral character is assessed not by what a man knows but by what he loves.
Anger is a weed; hate is a tree.
Free curiosity has greater power to stimulate learning than rigorous coercion. Nevertheless, the free ranging flux of curiosity is channeled by discipline under Your Law.
If you are pleased with what you are, you have stopped already. If you say, “It is enough,” you are lost. Keep on walking, moving forward, trying for the goal.
You don’t love in your enemies what they are, but what you would have them become by your prayers.
The measure of charity may be taken from the want of desires. As desires diminish in the soul, charity increases in it; and when it no longer feels any desire, then it possesses perfect charity.
The one who is our very Life descended into our world, and bore our death, and slew it with the abundance of His own life. Thundering, He called out to us to return to Him in heaven.
To dye oneself with paints in order to have a rosier or a paler complexion is a lying counterfeit.
God will not suffer man to have a knowledge of things to come for if he had prescience of his prosperity, he would be careless and if understanding of his adversity, he would be despairing and senseless.
For, were it not good that evil things should also exist, the omnipotent God would almost certainly not allow evil to be, since beyond doubt it is just as easy for Him not to allow what He does not will, as for Him to do what He will.
There are three ways in which sins are forgiven: in baptism, in prayer, and in the greater humility of penance; yet God does not forgive sins except to the baptized.
People travel to marvel at the mountains, seas, rivers and stars and they pass right by themselves without astonishment.
Why is it that man desires to be made sad, beholding doleful and tragical things, which yet himself would by no means suffer?
The entire most beautiful order of things that are very good, when their measures have been accomplished, is to pass away.
What is time? If I am not asked, I know; if I am asked, I don’t.