Apologia Pro Vita Sua Quotes

“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

“Living movements do not come of committees, nor are great ideas worked out through the post, even though it had been the penny post.”
― John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua

“Mr Kingsley begins then by exclaiming- 'O the chicanery, the wholesale fraud, the vile hypocrisy, the conscience-killing tyranny of Rome! We have not far to seek for an evidence of it. There's Father Newman to wit: one living specimen is worth a hundred dead ones. He, a Priest writing of Priests, tells us that lying is never any harm.'
I interpose: 'You are taking a most extraordinary liberty with my name. If I have said this, tell me when and where.'
Mr Kingsley replies: 'You said it, Reverend Sir, in a Sermon which you preached, when a Protestant, as Vicar of St Mary's, and published in 1844; and I could read you a very salutary lecture on the effects which that Sermon had at the time on my own opinion of you.'
I make answer: 'Oh...NOT, it seems, as a Priest speaking of Priests-but let us have the passage.'
Mr Kingsley relaxes: 'Do you know, I like your TONE. From your TONE I rejoice, greatly rejoice, to be able to believe that you did not mean what you said.'
I rejoin: 'MEAN it! I maintain I never SAID it, whether as a Protestant or as a Catholic.'
Mr Kingsley replies: 'I waive that point.'
I object: 'Is it possible! What? waive the main question! I either said it or I didn't. You have made a monstrous charge against me; direct, distinct, public. You are bound to prove it as directly, as distinctly, as publicly-or to own you can't.'
'Well,' says Mr Kingsley, 'if you are quite sure you did not say it, I'll take your word for it; I really will.'
My WORD! I am dumb. Somehow I thought that it was my WORD that happened to be on trial. The WORD of a Professor of lying, that he does not lie!
But Mr Kingsley reassures me: 'We are both gentlemen,' he says: 'I have done as much as one English gentleman can expect from another.'
I begin to see: he thought me a gentleman at the very time he said I taught lying on system...”
― John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua

“My argument is in outline as follows: that that absolute certitude which we were able to possess, whether as to the truths of natural theology, or as to the fact of a revelation, was the result of an assemblage of concurring and converging probabilities, and that, both according to the constitution of the human mind and the will of its Maker; that certitude was a habit of mind, that certainty was a quality of propositions; that probabilities which did not reach to logical certainty, might suffice for a mental certitude; that the certitude thus brought about might equal in measure and strength the certitude which was created by the strictest scientific demonstration; and that to possess such certitude might in given cases and to given individuals be a plain duty, though not to others in other circumstances:”
― John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua

“Lebendige Bewegungen gehen nicht von Komitees aus und große Ideen werden nicht durch einen Briefwechsel ausgearbeitet, selbst wenn das Porto noch so günstig ist.”
― John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua - John Henry Newman (ANNOTATED) Full Version of Great Classics Work

“Ihre Geheimnisse sind nicht anderes als die in menschliche Sprache gekleideten Formeln von Wahrheiten, die der menschliche Geist nicht zu erfassen vermag”
― John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua - John Henry Newman (ANNOTATED) Full Version of Great Classics Work

“If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflexion of its Creator.”
― John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua

“Of all points of faith, the being of a God is, to my own apprehension, encompassed with most difficulty, and yet borne in upon our minds with most power.”
― John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua

“I have always contended that obedience even to an erring conscience was the way to gain light, and that it mattered not where a man began, so that he began on what came to hand, and in faith; and that anything might become a divine method of Truth; that to the pure all things are pure, and have a self-correcting virtue and a power of germinating”
― John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua

“Los movimientos vivos no nacen de comisiones, ni las grandes ideas operan por correo,”
― John Henry Newman, Apologia pro vita sua: Historia de mis ideas religiosas (Religión)

“it is a vast assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions, brought together into one by the beauty and the Majesty of a Superhuman Power,—into what may be called a large reformatory or training-school, not as if into a hospital or into a prison, not in order to be sent to bed, not to be buried alive, but (if I may change my metaphor) brought together as if into some moral factory, for the melting, refining, and moulding, by an incessant, noisy process, of the raw material of human nature, so excellent, so dangerous, so capable of divine purposes.”
― John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua

“The Via Media has slept in libraries; it is a substitute of infancy for manhood.”
― John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua

“Let them be fierce with you who have no experience of the difficulty with which error is discriminated from truth, and the way of life is found amid the illusions of the world.”
― John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua