A Pilgrimage to Eternity Quotes

“Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tide of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought.” We are spiritual beings. But for many of us, malnutrition of the soul is a plague of modern life.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“Oh, for the pre-Twitter days, when it took something more than a word fart by a president who never opens a book to turn the world upside down.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“As well, she [i.e., Joan of Arc] is the only person ever condemned to death for heresy by the same faith that made her a saint—evidence of the deep bewilderment about women in a church run by men.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“I'll take the advice of Labre, the patron saint of wandering souls, who grew up not far from here: ‘There is no way. The way is made by walking.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“This paradox—how a belief founded on a gospel of love could cause so much pain—is a big reason why people are leaving the church in droves. And it’s no small part of my struggle as I step into the pilgrim realm.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“We are spiritual beings. But for many of us, malnutrition of the soul is a plague of modern life.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“He who opens a school door closes a prison.” “All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come.” “It is nothing to die. It is frightful not to live.” “Death has revelations: the great sorrows which open the heart, open the mind as well. . . . As for me, I have faith. I believe in a future life. How could I do otherwise? My daughter was a soul. I saw this soul. I touched it.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“beliefs are perhaps more allegorical than factual.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“Napoleon rarely marched off to battle without hundreds of cases of Moët & Chandon in tow. “I drink champagne when I win,” he said, “and I drink champagne when I lose.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“He [i.e., Augustine] asked the right questions. But some of his answers do not fit in a world that is so much more than sorrow and penance, more than denial, more than predestined awfulness or salvation, a world capable of producing joy and wonder in its everyday details. And those joys and wonders are not forbidden fruits— otherwise why would they be so abundant? To reject the "pleasure, beauty, and truth" that can be found in creation, as Augustine said he had to do in order to understand the divine, is not an argument for God. It's an argument against God.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“In his preaching, Christ condemned adulterous behavior, but otherwise said nothing in any of the four Gospels about whom you could love, or how you could love. He said nothing about sex between people of the same gender. He said nothing about the superiority of abstinence over experience, nothing about the who and how of coupling, the timing of when to have children and when to practice birth control, all the forbidden sex later codified in exhaustive detail by celibate men.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“In his preaching, Christ condemned adulterous behavior, but otherwise said nothing in any of the four Gospels about whom you could love, or how you could love. He said nothing about sex between people of the same gender. He said nothing about the superiority of abstinence over experience, nothing about the who and how of coupling, the timing of when to have children and when to practice birth control, all the forbidden sex later codified in exhaustive detail by celibate men. For that, you can blame his more censorious followers, those eunuchs on high moral ground looking down, turning natural pleasure into unnatural guilt, stoking ignorance into perversion, and on and on, up to the present day,”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“I can see Saint-Omer on a rise above the thinnest veil of dew, and beyond-- I can see for miles and miles. Off in the immediate forever, the days have no past, no future, only present, only the moment.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“I don't expect a miracle cure, but I have found that wishing for one is the most humbling form of prayer.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“It is not fitting, when one is in God's service, to have a gloomy face or a chilling look”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“Poverty is the ultimate freedom. You can't rob someone who has no possessions. You can't insult a person without pride.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“Start by doing what is necessary, then do what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“The audacity. Not only was she (Joan of Arc) a peasant girl, unschooled and clueless in the ways of power, class and the military strategy, weaponry, the mechanics of a siege, but was determined to go into battle. What she had was courage.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“An apple that hasn't experienced the hard times of cold is flat, tasteless, bland. But an apple that's hung in the hundred-degree temperatures of day and held through the thirty-five-degree nips of night is a fruit with experience. Cold helps to bring out the acid, which makes an apple tart. Color is painted by warmth.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“Keep your ears open. You know what the first word of the holy rule of Saint Benedict is? Listen.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“The main social media platforms have been weaponized to sow confusion and turn people against one another. Mass murder has come with misinformation. There’s a community for every viper’s pit of falsehoods on the world wide web.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“Religion is fable. Yes, a story! Poetic. Universal. And I would start in about faith, which by its very nature can never be proven, and that the foundational narratives of most religious”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“Charlemagne,”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“lurid”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“altogether.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“Coptic”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“The church sold some assets, raised money, and settled with 180 victims for $48 million. The money is small compensation, and small justice. It does not bring back the three lives that were taken, or restore the hundreds that were ruined, or end the generational ripples of sorrow still to come. Assumption was just one church, and Spokane just one town. But the pattern of abuse, the people who would never be able to repair themselves because of betrayal, happened in Boston, New York, Washington, Pittsburgh, Portland, Los Angeles , Tucson, Chicago, Milwaukee, anywhere that large numbers of Catholics lived, more than $2 billion in settlements. And it happened in Europe and South America and Africa and Australia. Apologies, high and low, have come and gone with the admissions. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith

“Observing that his penis had a mind of its own — "sometimes it refuses to act when the mind wills, while often it acts against his will" — led Augustine to theorize that we were born flawed.”
― Timothy Egan, A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith