When you reach your sixties, you have to decide whether you're going to be a sot or an ascetic. In other words if you want to go on working after you're sixty, some degree of asceticism is inevitable.
St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.
People think of faith as being something that you don't really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument... He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not be reason.
The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.
I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.
One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.
This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.
Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.
Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.
It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.
My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.
The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they're liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see. We need a kingdom of heaven in Heaven, if only because it can't be realized.
Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.
Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.
History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.
