When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.
You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties.
The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks
Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything.
Don’t shine so that others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see HIM.
One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.
Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.
Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.
There is someone that I love even though I don’t approve of what he does. There is someone I accept though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is……me.
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can’t supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.
If you never take risks, you’ll never accomplish great things. Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived.
After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us toward is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven.
God doesn’t want something from us. He simply wants us.
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘All right, then, have it your way.’
In such a fearful world, we need a fearless church
We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.
I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. It doesn’t change God – it changes me.
Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others.
God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.
The most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued, but the ones that are assumed.
