The best rules to form a young man are: to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one’s own opinions, and value others that deserve it.
It is a great mistake to think that God is chiefly concerned with our being religious.
The only way for a rich man to be healthy is by exercise and abstinence, to live as if he were poor.
The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit.
The greatest medicine is a true friend.
Humility does not mean thinking less of yourself than of other people, nor does it mean having a low opinion of your own gifts. It means freedom from thinking about yourself at all.
People that trust wholly to other’s charity, and without industry of their own, will always be poor.
If your prayer is selfish, the answer will be something that will rebuke your selfishness. You may not recognize it as having come at all, but it is sure to be there.
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.