Stephen > Stephen's Quotes

“The position of a man who not only refuses from a desire for independence to belong to any of the existing political parties, but is also for very definite reasons against every one of them, and yet still is aware of the major importance of political realities, the position of such a man is uncomfortable... and it is mine”
― Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism, Freedom in the Modern World, and A Letter on Independence, Revised Edition

“It is not enough to know God as a theory, from what we read in books or feel some fleeting motions of affection for Him brief as the wave of feeling, or glimpse of the divine that prompts them. Our faith must be alive, and we must make it so.”
― Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, The Practice of the Presence of God:

“I do not advise you to use multiplicity of words in prayer. Many words and long discourses are often the occasions of wandering. Hold yourself in prayer before God, like a dumb or paralytic beggar at a rich man's gate.”
― Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, The Practice of the Presence of God

“He is always near you and with you. Leave Him not alone. You would think it rude to leave a friend alone who came to visit you. Why, then, must God be neglected?”
― Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, The Practice of the Presence of God

“Sandro? What am I going to do? What’s going to happen to me, to you, to Xenia, to Alix, to mother, to all of Russia? I’m not ready to be tsar. I never wanted to become one. I’ve no idea of even how to talk to the ministers. Will you help me, Sandro?”
― Nicholas II Romanov

“I’m glad the child is a girl. Had it been a boy he would have belonged to the people. Being a girl she belongs to us.”
― Nicholas II Romanov

“The body politic also contains in its superior unity the family units, whose essential rights and freedoms are anterior to itself, and a multiplicity of other particular societies which proceed from the free initiative of citizens and should be as autonomous as possible. Such is the element of pluralism inherent in every truly political society.”
― Jacques Maritain, Man and the State

“For democracies today the most urgent endeavor is to develop social Justice and improve world economic management, and to defend themselves against totalitarian threats from the outside and totalitarian expansion in the world; but the pursuit of these objectives will inevitably involve the risk of having too many functions of social life controlled by the State from above…”
― Jacques Maritain, Man and the State

“The primary duty of the modern State is the enforcement of social justice.”
― Jacques Maritain, Man and the State

“A law is not made just by the sole fact that is expresses the will of the people. An unjust law, even if it expresses the will of the people, is not law.”
― Jacques Maritain, Man and the State

“To try to reduce democracy to technocracy, and to expel from it the Gospel inspiration together with all faith in the supra-material, supra-mathematical, and supra-sensory realities, would be to try to deprive it of its very blood. Democracy can only live on Gospel inspiration.”
― Jacques Maritain, Man and the State

“Characteristically, I asked no one’s advice. I just prayed and fought with myself—and finally decided, since it was so hard, I would do it. God must have a special Providence for hard-headed people like me.”
― Walter Ciszek

“Lubianka was a hard school, but a good one. I learned there the lesson which would keep me going in the years to come: religion, prayer, and love of God do not change reality, but they govern it a new meaning.”
― Walter Ciszek, SJ

“Nostalgia - the nostalgia for our roots - is a healthy feeling, since people with no roots are lost, and a person with no roots is sick. Roots give us the strength to move forward, to bear fruit, to blossom”
― Pope Francis, Hope: The Autobiography

“Emigration and war are two sides of a single coin. It has been rightly said that the greatest producer of migrants is war - war in one guise or another, since climate change and poverty are, essentially, the sick fruit of a blind war that man himself has declared - against a fairer distribution of resources, against nature, against his own planet.”
― Pope Francis, Hope: The Autobiography

“So we took our books and went back over a hundred years of Italian history in search of a "just war." It's not our fault if we didn't find one.”
― Don Lorenzo Milani

“Today, when I meet married couples, I always say: Go ahead and argue, break a few plates if you think it helps - to some extent, that's quite normal - but never do it in front of the children, and try to make up before the day is over. Because the real danger is that of the cold war the next day.”
― Pope Francis, Hope: The Autobiography

“The idea of continually returning to ashes is the nostalgia of fundamentalists, but this must not be the true sense of the word: Tradition, instead, is a root that is essential for the tree always to bear fruit”
― Pope Francis

“It is undoubtedly true, though it may seem paradoxical; but in general, those who are habitually employed in finding and displaying faults, are unqualified for the work of reformation: because their minds are not only unfurnished with patterns of the fair and good, but by habit their come to take no delight in the contemplation of those things.”
― Edmund Burke, Reflections On The Revolution In France [Christmas Summary Classics]