Defeating the purpose

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, “Where’s the self-help section?” She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose. - George Carlin

No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill

There is no fact that cannot be vulgarized and presented in a ludicrous light. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Thoughts on priesthood

I know my own soul, how feeble and puny it is: I know the magnitude of this ministry, and the great difficulty of the work; for more stormy billows vex the soul of the priest than the gales which disturb the sea. - St. John Chrysostom

He made them, the vicars of his love. - St. Ambrose

We pay a heavy, very heavy price for the superhuman dignity of our calling. The ridiculous is always so near to the sublime. And the world, usually so indulgent to foibles, hates ours instinctively.  -  Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest

Words, words, words

We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them. - Abigail Adams

Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, and two minds conscious of the same thought, but as long as it remains unspoken their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea. - Nathaniel Hawthorne


Words are the most powerful drug used by mankind. - Rudyard Kipling

Why the Church?

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became man for no other purpose. - C.S. Lewis

If the churches ever did reunite, it would have to be into something that was as sacramental and liturgical and authoritative as the Roman Catholic Church and as protesting against abuses and as much focused on the individual in his direct relationship with Christ as the Evangelicals, as charismatic as the Pentecostals, as missionary-minded as the old mainline denominations, as focused on holiness as the Methodists or the Quakers, as committed to the social aspects of the Gospel as the social activists, as Biblical as fundamentalists, and as mystical as the Eastern Orthodox. - Peter Kreeft

The difficulty explaining why I am Catholic is that there are 10,000 reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true. - G.K. Chesterton

Thoughts on government

The less government we have the better—the fewer laws and the less confided power. The antidote to this abuse of formal government is the influence of private character, the growth of the individual. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. - Thomas Jefferson

A government for the people must depend for its success on the intelligence, the morality, the justice, and the interest of the people themselves. - Grover Cleveland

Out of adversity

Genuine morality is preserved only in the school of adversity; a state of continuous prosperity may easily prove a quicksand of virtue. - Johann Schiller

Adversity makes men; good fortune makes monsters. - French Proverb

The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials. - Chinese Proverb

To tell the truth

Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use. - Mark Twain

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority. - Francis Bacon

Truth must be repeated again and again, because error is constantly being preached round about. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe