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How can the heart be true when reason lies?
Or is it reason that corrects the heart?
Perhaps the ruin of the thing I love
Has wrought such hatred of all life that I
To hatred even of what I love descend,
Despising it for its inconstancy;

Man was so limited he hadn’t even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died; the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater glory lay around the death. It was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or a civilization – it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.

You could trust God to make allowances, but you couldn’t trust. smallpox, starvation, men…

Peter there
Discerned the truth that he had now forsworn
And at the objurgation of his heart
He hated that which he had bought, his life,
And wept, and beat his brow, and went from thence.

“You’re crazy, son,” the Fire Chief told him. “Well Dad,” the boy answered, ”if Saint Patrick had never come to Ireland as a missioner, you’d still be a heathen.”

he quoted the words of Bishop James Anthony Walsh, Maryknoll’s founder. “Better to wear out than rust out,” he said, and turned back to his chores and his mission work.

It is one of the strange discoveries a man can make that life, however you lead it, contains moments of exhilaration; there are always comparisons which can be made with worse times: even in danger and misery the pendulum swings.

As long as man prevails on this old earth, he will look up to the heavens, and ask his questions, and wonder, and listen, and marvel, and hope again. And most important of all, grace will be present until the final day. My words may crumble into dust, yet His will remain forever.

As any, father knows, girls are ever a cause of concern, for their protection demands constant vigilance.

“…We cannot hang our lives upon a thread of someone’s story.”
“Oh, it is far more than a story, though it must be related by stories…”

Man seeks certainty in an uncertain world, and thus he consults oracles and diviners and would even turn the phantasms of his dreaming mind into messages from the gods. If we live that way, we will soon run around and around in circles, the slave of every phantom our lower emotions throw onto the stage.

Was he lonely? Yes, at times. But on the whole, he was happy. He had his work and his family and his collection of medical and philosophical books, which he enlarged continually. He was at the risk of becoming a pedant or a recluse, but his warm spirit would not let him sink for long in those directions. He loved his friends and occasionally drank with them, always in moderation.

I have tears, wife. Yet it is men’s lot to save their tears for the night and solitude, that they may retain their strength for others’ sake.

All killers kill their true selves before their bodily deaths, and take others down with them before the end.

We experience emotional katharsis when we view tragedy performed on stage. We are struck dumb when we see it in real life.

“There are swords and there are swords. There is swift death and lingering death.”

(If a monk were to leave the monastery) the form of profession which the abbot took from him at the altar he shall not receive back, but it shall be kept in the monastery.

“See the law under which you wish to fight. If you can observe it enter upon the life; if you cannot you are free to depart.”

Idleness is the enemy of the soul.

Nothing, therefore, shall be put before the Divine Office.

… where feelings of love are concerned, truth too often dissolves.

The daily rosary is a powerful weapon in the fight for chastity, as is the custom of saying three Hail Marys before going to bed for holy purity.

Loneliness is a call to prayer.

There is no progress in the spiritual life without chastity. Sexual sins, even relatively minor ones, choke the flow of grace in our souls.

Holy purity protects your capacity to love. It is the art of loving well.

The boys I’m most concerned about don’t disdain school because they have other real-world activities they care about more. They disdain school because they disdain everything. Nothing really excites them.

I believe, in fact I am certain, that many men never give out the whole of themselves, their deepest truth. They live on the surface, and yet, so rich is the soil of humanity that even this thin outer layer is able to yield a kind of meagre harvest which gives the illusion of real living.

If our own cultural life is refined and edifying and not pitched to the lowest common denominator, not leveled down to meet the standards of the most illiterate person in the pew, then we might start to look as though we have been redeemed.

As a matter of logic, if they [students] begin to think like post-moderns refusing to use their intellects to make value judgments, they will abandon their faith.