QUOTES

"When we talk to God, we're praying. When God talks to us, we're schizophrenic."

--Lily Tomlin

"Self-will should be so completely poured out of the vessel of the soul into the ocean of the will of God, that whatever God may will, that at once the soul should will; and whatever God may allow, that the soul at once should willingly embrace, whether it may be in itself sweet or bitter."

--Louis de Blois, A Short Rule, 16th century.

"Catholicism (...) is often spoken of as it were actually one of the wild passions of youth. Optimistic aunts and uncles say that the youth will 'get over it,' as if it were a childish love affair or that unfortunate business with the barmaid. Darker and sterner aunts and uncles, perhaps at a rather earlier period, used actually to talk about it as an indecent indulgence, as if its literature were literally a sort of pornography. Newman remarks quite naturally, as if there were nothing odd about it at the time, that an undergraduate found with an ascetic manual or a book of monastic meditations was under a sort of cloud or taint, as having been caught with 'a bad book' in his possession. He had been wallowing in the sensual pleasure of Nones or inflaming his lusts by contemplating an incorrect number of candles."

--G.K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion (early 20th century).

"To know Jesus and Jesus crucified is the sum total of my philosophy."

--Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

"Flattery is all right so long as you don't inhale."

--Adlai Stevenson

"I do not seek, I find."

--Pablo Picasso

"It must the right of every person to die of old age. And if we secure this right for ourselves, we can, coincidentally, assure it for the planet."

--Alice Walker, Living by the Word, 1988

"When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."

--Don Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife, Brazil.

"No amount of pious training or pious culture will protect the faithful or preserve them from the contamination of the age, if they are left inferior to non-Catholics in secular learning and intellectual development. The faithful must be guarded and protected by being trained and disciplined to grapple with the errors and false systems of the age. They must be not only more religiously, but also more intellectually educated. They must be better armed than their opponents,-- surpass them in the strength and vigor of their minds, and in the extent and variety of their knowledge. They must, on all occasions and against all adversaries, be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in them."

--Orestes Brownson, Catholic Polemics, 1861.

"Love and faith are as much realities as artistic faculties, and need similar cultivation."

--R.H. Benson, Lord of the World, (20th century)

"Look not to the light but rather to the raging fire that carries the soul to God with intense fervor and glowing love."

--St. Bonaventure (on instructing theologians)