Joyce > Joyce's Quotes

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.”
― G. K. Chesterton

“There is the great lesson of 'Beauty and the Beast,' that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.”
― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

“The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross

“The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“L'histoire est le produit le plus dangereux que la chimie de l'intellect ait élaboré. Ses propriétés sont bien connues. Il fait rêver, il enivre les peuples, leur engendre de faux souvenirs, exagère leurs réflexes, entretient leurs vieilles plaies, les tourmente dans leur repos, les conduit au délire des grandeurs ou à celui de la persécution, et rend les nations amères, superbes, insupportables et vaines.

L'histoire justifie ce que l'on veut. Elle n'enseigne rigoureusement rien, car elle contient tout, et donne des exemples de tout.”
― Paul Valéry, Regards sur le monde actuel et autres essais

“Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt, as I understand the subject; difficulty and doubt are incommensurate.”
― John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua

“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”
― St. Catherine of Siena

“What seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical Church so defines.”
― St. Ignatius of Loyola

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.”
― Fulton J. Sheen

“Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.”
― Fulton J. Sheen

“To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”
― John Henry Newman

“To a great extent the level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood. When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.”
― Fulton Sheen