The Shoes of the Fisherman Quotes

“You are not born to peace, my friend. This is the first thing you must accept. You will not come to it, perhaps, till the day you die. Each of us has his own cross, you know, made and fitted to his reluctant shoulders.”
― Morris West , The Shoes of the Fisherman: 1

“Perhaps that is part of the meaning of pain – that it challenges our arrogant possession of life; that it confronts us with our own frailty and makes us aware, however dimly, of the sustaining power of the Creator.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“Look at him by scale and proportion and you find him on the one hand a minuscule dwarf, in a universe without apparent limits. Measure him by another scale and you find in partial control of the enormity in which he lives…”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“alegría es un don que se acepta con agradecimiento y sin intentar pagarlo, así como no se intenta pagar la luz del sol ni el canto de los pájaros.”
― Morris L. West, Las sandalias del pescador

“Who cares about theology except the theologians? We are necessary, but less important than we think. The Church is Christ—Christ and the people. And all the people want to know is whether or not there is a God, and what is His relation with them, and how they can get back to Him when they stray.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“Campeggio was right. I’m too soft. One push and I fell apart.’ ‘Comes a time when we all fall apart, George. The real test is when we have to put ourselves together again.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“It would be dangerously simple to wrap up her love in a candy-box and offer it as a solace for the lost one. For her own sake and for his, she must not do it. Love was less than half the answer when the pillars of a man’s self-respect were shaken and the rooftrees came tumbling round his ears. Sooner or later he had to walk out of the wreckage on his own two feet, and the truest recipe of love was to let him do it.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“Have you ever thought that the Russian revolution, the present might of Soviet Russia, was built on the work of Karl Marx, who spent a large part of his life in the British Museum and is now buried in England? The most explosive thing in the world is an idea.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“Have you never been a pessimist yourself, Jean? Have you never felt caught up in this endless turning of the wheel of life?”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“If the universe is not centred on man, if man as the centre of the universe is not centred on the Creator, then the cosmos is a meaningless blasphemy. The day is not far distant when men will understand that even in biological terms, they have only one choice: suicide or an act of worship.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“He has accepted too fully a materialist conception of man and of the universe. However, I do believe that, within the limits of his own logic, he has arrived at an understanding of the dignity of man, and a sense of obligation to preserve it as far as he can. I”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“I do not think he is governed by moral sanctions as we understand them in the spiritual sense. But he does realize that a certain practical morality is essential to social order, and even to the survival of civilization as we know it.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“No man remains unchanged by the experience of power. Some are perverted to tyranny. Some are corrupted by flattery and self-indulgence. Some very few are tempered to wisdom by their understanding of the consequences of executive action.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“I’m a casuist,’ said Campeggio with a thin smile. ‘I can split hairs as well as the Jesuits. It suits me to be in doubt.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“Was good enough to say!’ Her old voice crackled with contempt. ‘Why should you care what he says? What is praise, anyway, but breakfast for the prisoner before they cut his throat?”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“I am obsessed by the belief that the prime mission of the Church is a pastoral and not a diplomatic one.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“He had few regrets, because regret had always seemed a vanity and alien to his nature.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“I tried to show her that the crisis of near despair which afflicts many people of intelligence and noble spirit is often a providential act, designed to bring them to an acceptance of their own nature, with all its limitations and inadequacies, and of the conformity of that nature with a divine design whose pattern and whose end we cannot fully apprehend.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“The words of the woman who saw it with me still ring in my ears – ‘They can cope with death. It’s the living that defeats them.’ It seems to me that this defeat is the measure of our failure in the ministry of the Word.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“If the majority were not conclusive, the ballot papers would be burned with wet straw, and the smoke would issue dark and cloudy. Only when the ballot was successful would the papers be burned without straw, so that a white smoke might inform the waiting crowds that they had a new Pope. It was an archaic and cumbersome ceremony for the age of radio and television, but it served to underline the drama of the moment and the continuity of two thousand years of papal history.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“The danger of all rulers is that they begin to believe that history is the result of great generalities, instead of the sum of millions of small particulars, like bad drainage and sexual obsession and the anopheles mosquito…”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“They are caught, these old and deliberate men, in the dilemma of all principality: that the higher one rises, the more one sees of the world, but the less one apprehends of the small determining factors of human existence.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“Strange for how long one accepted with apparent equanimity the kind of person one seemed to be, the state to which one had apparently been nominated in life. Then all of a sudden, the identity was called in question…”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“Either way there was an uncomfortable mystery: how the chaos of history could issue in so consistent a hold on dogma or why an omniscient God chose such a messy method of preserving His foothold in the minds of His creatures.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“The Church is Christ – Christ and the people. And all the people want to know is whether or no there is a God, and what is His relation with them, and how they can get back to Him when they stray.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“And what does it mean? Nothing. Who cares about theology except the theologians? We are necessary but less important than we think.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“Look at him by scale and proportion and you find him on the one hand a minuscule dwarf, in a universe without apparent limits. Measure him by another scale and you find in partial”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“they sometimes affirm his identity without understanding his individuality,”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

“«Saben entendérselas con la muerte. Es la vida lo que los desconcierta.»”
― Morris L. West, Las sandalias del pescador

“waste of time was therefore a waste of the currency of salvation.”
― Morris L. West, The Shoes of the Fisherman