It is a great mistake to think that God is chiefly concerned with our being religious.
People that trust wholly to other’s charity, and without industry of their own, will always be poor.
When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don’t, they don’t.
Christianity founds hospitals and atheists are cured in them, never knowing they owe their cure to Christ.
It is sometimes said that conduct is supremely important and worship helps it. The truth is that worship is supremely important and conduct tests it.
True worship is when a person, through their person, attains intimacy and friendship with God.
To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.
A man’s wisdom is his best friend; folly, his worst enemy.
The greatest pleasure in life is love.
Some of the Fathers went so far as to esteem the love of music a sign of predestination, as a thing divine, and reserved for the felicities of heaven itself.
Learning passes for wisdom among those who want both.
I prefer a God who once and for all impressed his will upon creation, to one who continually busied about modifying what he had already done.
Science has its being in a perpetual mental restlessness.
Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God. It is the quickening of the conscience by his holiness; the nourishment of mind with his truth; the purifying of imagination by his beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to his purpose – all this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable.
Religion is what you do with your solitude.
Little things are little things; but faithfulness in little things is a very great thing.
The most influential of all educational factor is the conversation in a child’s home.
Art is the effort to appreciate and express the God who is its Beauty.
Pharisees – men who lived in the strength of a fellowship that had behind it the greatest religious tradition in all the world, but who, because they trusted more to their tradition than to the God who inspired it, were unable to recognise the still further call of God when it came to them.
I shall conclude with a saying of Alponsus, surnamed the Wise, King of Aragon – that among so many things as are by men possessed or pursued in the course of their lives, all the rest are baubles, besides old wood to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to converse with, and old books to read!
No one who is not a Christian in spirit can perform the Christian act; and the Sermon on the Mount is not a code of rules to be mechanically followed; it is the description of the life which any man will spontaneously lead when once the Spirit of Christ has taken complete possession of his heart.