The Life You Save May Be Your Own Quotes

“Why not scientific humanism? “It’s not good enough.” Why isn’t it? “This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and have to answer, ‘Scientific humanism.’ That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less.”
― Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

“A pilgrimage is a journey undertaken in the light of a story. A great event has happened; the pilgrim hears the reports and goes in search of the evidence, aspiring to be an eyewitness. The pilgrim seeks not only to confirm the experience of others firsthand but to be changed by the experience.”
― Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

“There is greater comfort in the substance of silence than in the answer to a question,”
― Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

“life lived in search of God is real life, the only life worth living.”
― Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

“The point is, however: God save us all from the moral zealot who places himself above the law and is willing to burn my house down, and yours, providing he feels he is sufficiently right and I sufficiently wrong.”
― Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

“While the crisis lasted, people loved each other,” she wrote in her autobiography. “It was as though they were united in Christian solidarity.”
― Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

“glory and accomplishment are of far less importance than the creation of character and the individual good life.”
― Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

“Always Christianity is somewhere in decline, he proposed, and “always Providence has another people quietly maturing to relieve the decadent of their burden.”
― Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

“At the root of all war is fear: not so much the fear men have of one another as the fear they have of everything,” Merton declared.”
― Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

“Nowadays it is no longer a question of who is right, but who is at least not criminal,”
― Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

“hand. Here was a Catholic counterpart to Brooks and Warren, shifting the emphasis away from the artist and toward the work of art. An”
― Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage