Paul Robinson > Paul's Quotes

“With the Chinese and Indians, mythos destroyed
logos; with Aristotle, logos destroyed mythos; with Aquinas, mythos perfected logos. This is no small reason to believe that Aquinas’s mythos was not mythology.”
― Paul Athanasius Robinson, The Realist Guide to Religion and Science

“Krauss seems to think that if he describes how one thing comes from another, probing into smaller and smaller things, he will eventually come to nothing at the bottom of it all, as the cause of it all. But talking about how some things come from other things says nothing about how they can come from nothing.”
― Paul Athanasius Robinson

“In today’s climate, it is considered to be rational and
scientific when some material cause is ascribed to the origin of life: lightning, molecules on crystals, aliens who came from non-life. Ascribing a non-material cause to life’s origin, such as intelligence, on the other hand, is said to be irrational and unscientific. Intelligence is unintelligence, because only non-intelligence can be intelligent.”
― Paul Athanasius Robinson, The Realist Guide to Religion and Science

“Of itself, natural selection is a small strip of explanation. When it is used to account for a little part of the body of reality, it does a fine job. But when it is stretched in an attempt to cover the whole of reality—when it is divinised—things quickly become ridiculous.
It is the very nature of the empiricist enterprise to extend material causes so far beyond their own proper domain that they are trying to cover being itself. That the nakedness of reality remains uncovered by such attempts is all too transparent.”
― Paul Athanasius Robinson, The Realist Guide to Religion and Science

“We must not confine ourselves to reciting the words [in prayer] with our lips; it is necessary that we should raise to God our mind by attention, our heart by devotion, and our will by submission.”
― Vitalis Lehodey, The Ways of Mental Prayer

“Was Archbishop Lefebvre justified in contemplating illicit consecrations? ... At the time I believed he was wrong. Twenty years after his death, I believe he was right. Without his action, the traditionalists would now be an ineffective handful of priests at the mercy of the Modernist Church.”
― H.J.A. Sire, Phoenix from the Ashes: The Making, Unmaking, and Restoration of Catholic Tradition

“[Archbishop Lefebvre's excommunication] may be compared with the excommunications that popes in former times pronounced on their political enemies, sentences which were formally valid but which nobody today would regard as having moral force. In fact its weight is less, for the excommunication came not from a merely secular policy but from one aimed at excluding tradition from the Church or obliging it to compromise with false principles.”
― H.J.A. Sire, Phoenix from the Ashes: The Making, Unmaking, and Restoration of Catholic Tradition

“Books are the food of the soul. Good and wholesome food given to a hungry body will nourish it, but if the food is poisonous, it will be injurious to the system. The same happens with reading. If people read good and instructive books at regular and proper times, it will strengthen and nourish them greatly.”
― Anthony Mary Claret, The Autobiography of St. Anthony Mary Claret

“Mihi mori lucrum--For me to die is a gain. To die, murdered by the haters of Jesus Christ, would be my gain. All my fervent desires have always been to die in a hospital as a poor man, or on the scaffold as a martyr, murdered by enemies because of the most holy religion that we profess and preach. I should like to seal with my blood the virtues and truths which I have preached and taught.”
― Anthony Mary Claret, The Autobiography of St. Anthony Mary Claret

“If a man wants to be always in God’s company, he must pray regularly and read spiritual books regularly. When we pray, we talk to God; when we read, God talks to us.”
― Isidore of Seville

“The amazing but in retrospect unsurprising fact established by the diligent work of many investigators in laboratory evolution over decades is that the great majority of even beneficial positively selected mutations damage an organism’s genetic information—either degrading or outright destroying functional coded elements.”
― Michael Behe

“You live in a deranged age - more deranged than usual, because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.”
― Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

“THE order of God’s Providence maintains a perpetual vicissitude in the material being of this world; day is continually turning to night, spring to summer, summer to autumn, autumn to winter, winter to spring; no two days are ever exactly alike. Some are foggy, rainy, some dry or windy; and this endless variety greatly enhances the beauty of the universe. And even so precisely is it with man (who, as ancient writers have said, is a miniature of the world), for he is never long in any one condition, and his life on earth flows by like the mighty waters, heaving and tossing with an endless variety of motion; one while raising him on high with hope, another plunging him low in fear; now turning him to the right with rejoicing, then driving him to the left with sorrows; and no single day, no, not even one hour, is entirely the same as any other of his life. All this is a very weighty warning, and teaches us to aim at an abiding and unchangeable evenness of mind amid so great an uncertainty of events; and, while all around is changing, we must seek to remain immoveable, ever looking to, reaching after and desiring our God.”
― Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life - Enhanced Version

“There is the grievous fact of the loss of Eucharistic fragments because of Communion in the hand. No one can deny this. Fragments of the consecrated host fall to the floor and are subsequently crushed by feet. This is horrible! Our God is trampled on in our churches! No one can deny it. This is happening on a large scale. We cannot continue as if Jesus our God is not really present, as though the Eucharist is only bread. As I said before, the modern practice of Communion in the hand has nothing to do with the practice in the ancient Church.”
― Athanasius Schneider, Christus Vincit: Christ's Triumph Over the Darkness of the Age

“Then the good and wise judge whom we are seeking is not this man, but the other; for vice cannot know virtue too, but a virtuous nature, educated by time, will acquire a knowledge both of virtue and vice: the virtuous, and not the vicious, man has wisdom—in my opinion.”
― Plato, The Republic

“Give that child to me. I want it. I will care for it. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child.”
― Mother Teresa

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“For not in our fashion does He look forward to what is future, nor at what is present, nor back upon what is past; but in a manner quite different and far and profoundly remote from our way of thinking.  For He does not pass from this to that by transition of thought, but beholds all things with absolute unchangeableness; so that of those things which emerge in time, the future, indeed, are not yet, and the present are now, and the past no longer are; but all of these are by Him comprehended in His stable and eternal presence.”
― Augustine of Hippo, St. Augustine of Hippo: The City of God

“America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance — it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.”
― Fulton J. Sheen

“Without friends, no one would want to live, even if he had all other goods.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics

“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

“Another time I was working in the laundry, and the Sister opposite, while washing handkerchiefs, repeatedly splashed me with dirty water. My first impulse was to draw back and wipe my face, to show the offender I should be glad if she would behave more quietly; but the next minute I thought how foolish it was to refuse the treasures God offered me so generously, and I refrained from betraying my annoyance. On the contrary, I made such efforts to welcome the shower of dirty water, that at the end of half an hour I had taken quite a fancy to this novel kind of aspersion, and I resolved to come as often as I could to the happy spot where such treasures were freely bestowed.”
― Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux

“So seek beauty, Miss Prim. Seek it in silence, in tranquillity; seek it in the middle of the night and at dawn. Pause to close doors while you seek it, and don't be surprised if it doesn't reside in museums or in palaces. Don't be surprised if, in the end, you find beauty to be not in Something but Someone.”
― Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera, The Awakening of Miss Prim

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil.

Thanks to ideology the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing calculated on a scale in the millions.

Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth. Yet, I have not given up all hope that human beings and nations may be able, in spite of all, to learn from the experience of other people without having to go through it personally.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956