Great Throughts Treasury

"Once you accept the existence of God - however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him - then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things."

"If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth."

"Man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage."

"If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine."

"All institutions are prone to corruption and to the vices of their members. "

"The fact is that the learning process goes on, and so long as the voices are not stilled and the singers go on singing some of it gets through."

"One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying."

"There are still things I want to do but they're not necessary for me to do. I'm not clinging to anything that I can't open my hands and let go."

"I can write no more today. The contemplation of my sorry state has reduced me to so deep a melancholy that I contemplate opening my wrist like Petronius Arbiter and lapsing quietly into oblivion. Unlike Petronius, however, I shall have neither the sound of music nor the gentle talk of friends. I still have time to choose a better moment — besides, who knows to what nightmares I might awake."

"You know one of the causes of modern despair is the fact that we have had proposed to us, from various quarters, an impossible perfection."

"It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment, or the courage, to pay the price…. One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return of love. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying."

"I wonder how it will read five hundred years from now? — To make a man confess a loving God you burn him!"

"There are a few of us — madmen all! — who are in love with knowing, who would sell the last shirt from our backs for one small truth, one tiny star-fire to light up the murk and mystery of what we call our life… We may go blind before we see it, that's the haunting... No man — prince, peasant, pope, — has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy!"

"Who saw what men could do to one who heard an alien music! Bend to me, be tender. I am blind and deaf and dumb. And yet I do see visions, shout a kind of praise, feel in my pulse apocalyptic drums."

"History is always written by victors, and the defeated create a new set of myths to explain the past and gild the future."

"You I admire as being more, — much more — a man, and more believer too, than half the canting orthodox."

"Each of us can walk only the path he sees at his own feet. Each of us is subject to the consequences of his own belief."

"And I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people."

"Even in sin, the act of love -done with love- is shadowed with divinity. Its conformity may be at fault, but its nature is not altered, and its nature is creative, communicative, splendid in surrender. It was in the splendor of my surrender to Nina and she to me, that I first understood how a man might surrender himself to God -if a God existed. The moment of love is a moment of union -of body and spirit- and the act of faith is mutual and implicit."

"Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!"

"For the rest of us, there remains still the pilgrimage, the journey in hope and mutual caring toward the ultimate revelation of eternal Goodness. It is not for nothing that the symbols of that hope are a star still blazing in the heavens and a babe, newborn, sleeping in a manger with dumb and innocent animals for guardians."

"He had fallen into the error of all liberals: the belief that men are prepared to reform themselves, that good will attracts good will, that truth has leavening virtue of its own."

"I can't tell you why God made you the way you are any more than I can tell you why he's planted a carcinoma in my stomach to make me die painfully while other men die peacefully in their sleep. The cogs of creation seem to slip all the time. Babies are born with two heads, mothers of families run crazy with carving knives, men die in plague, famine and thunderstorms. Why? Only God knows."

"I feel the life slipping out of me. When the pain comes, I cry out, but there is no prayer in it, only fear. I kneel and recite my office and the Rosary but the words are empty - dry gourds rattling in the silence. The dark is terrible and I feel so alone. I see no signs but the symbols of contradiction. I try to dispose myself to faith, hope and charity, but my will is a blown reed in the winds of despair."

"He spoke a kind of ecclesiastical jargon; a debased rhetoric that explained nothing but brought the truth into disrepute. It begged all the questions and answered none. The massive structure of reason and revelation on which the church was founded was reduced to ritual incantation, formless, fruitless and essentially false. Peppermint piety. It deceived no one but the man who peddled it. It satisfied no one but old ladies and girls in green-sickness; yet it flourished most rankly where the Church was most firmly entrenched in the established order. It was the mark of accommodation, compromise, laxity among the clergy, who find it easier to preach devotion than to affront the moral and social problems of the time. It covered fatuity and lack of education. It left people naked and unarmed in the face of terrifying mysteries: pain, passion, death and the great perhaps of the hereafter."

"I believe in saints as I believe in sanctity. I believe in miracles as I believe in God, who can suspend the laws of His own making. But I believe, too, that the hand of God writes plainly and simply, for all men of good will to read. I am doubtful of His presence in confusion and conflicting voices."

"I don't believe in miracles, only unexplained facts."

"I look out of this window and I think this is a cosmos, this is a huge creation, this is one small corner of it. The trees and birds and everything else and I'm part of it. I didn't ask to be put here, I've been lucky in finding myself here."

"I was lost a long time, without knowing it. Without the Faith, one is free, and that is a pleasant feeling at first. There are no questions of conscience, no constraints, except the constraints of custom, convention and the law, and these are flexible enough for most purposes. It is only later that terror comes. One is free - but free in chaos, in an unexplained and unexplainable world. One is free in a desert, from which there is no retreat but inward, toward the hollow core of oneself. There is nothing to build on but the small rock of one's own pride, and this is a nothing, based on nothing... I think, therefore I am. But what am I? An accident of disorder, going no place."

"I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people."

"If prayer fails I am in a greater darkness yet, not knowing whether I have presumed too much or believed too little."

"I'm a Nolan. I could dazzle you in dialect, because the words do not make the same sense to different men."

"Look at yourself! You're a priest. You know damn well that if I were setting out to make a girl at this moment instead of young Paolo, you'd take an entirely different view. You'd disapprove, sure! You'd read me a lecture on fornication and all the rest. But you wouldn't be too unhappy. I'd be normal... according to nature! But I am not made like that. God didn't make me like that. But do I need love the less? Do I need satisfaction less? Have I less right to live in contentment because somewhere along the line the Almighty slipped a cog in creation?... What's your answer to that Meredith? What's your answer for me? Tie a knot in myself and take up badminton and wait till they make me an angel in heaven, where they don't need this sort of thing anymore? I'm lonely! I need love like the next man! My sort of love!"

"No man ? prince, peasant, pope, ? has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy!""

"None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature."

"Once you accept the existence of God ? however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him ? then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things. You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage."

"The man who does good in doubt must have so much more merit than one who does it in the bright certainty of belief. Other sheep I have which are not of this fold... A warning against the smugness of inherited faith."

"Other priests, he knew, found an intense pleasure in the raw, salty dialect of peasant conversation. They picked up pearls of wisdom and experience over a farmhouse table or a cup of wine in a workingman's kitchen. They talked with equal familiarity to the rough-tongued whores of Trastevere and the polished signori of Parioli. They enjoyed the ribald humor of the fish market as much as the wit of a Cardinal's dinner table. They were good priests too, and they did much good for their people, with a singular satisfaction to themselves."

"One of the greatest mistakes we have made in the Church, a mistake we have repeated down the centuries- because we are human and often very stupid- is to make laws about everything. We have covered the pasture-land with fences, so there is no place for the sheep to run free. We do it, we say, to keep them safe. I know, because I have done it all too often. But the sheep are not safe: they languish in a confinement that was never their natural habitat."

"The writer has to be the kind of man who turns the world upside down and says, look, it looks different, doesn?t it?"

"One solved nothing by waving the commandments like a bludgeon at people's heads. There was no point in shouting damnation at a man who was already walking himself to hell on his own two feet. One had to pray for the Grace of God and then go probing like a good psychologist for the fear that might condition him to repentance or the love that might draw him toward it."

"There are a few of us ? madmen all! ? who are in love with knowing, who would sell the last shirt from our backs for one small truth, one tiny star-fire to light up the murk and mystery of what we call our life? We may go blind before we see it, that's the haunting ?"

"To make that long, last donkey-ride between the pikeman and the stake, to hear the shouting and the chant of hypocrites, to be a spectacle for animals in human masks!"

"They got out of the car and took off into the Royal Palm Village area (a mobile home community) where they stole a four-wheeler."

"We are ants on the carcass of the world, spawned out of nothing, going busily nowhere. One of us dies, the others crawl over us to the pickings."

"Well I travelled quite a lot in the east, and one of the things that impressed me greatly was the Buddhist notion of the continuity of things, the wheel of life which is what we're talking about, the ever turning wheel."

"Who said to me, a fetus in the womb, a puling babe, "You have your life, but on the condition that you thus believe?" No one! Not even God! So gentlemen, I say you have no right to make terms for my life. I tell you then ? No! I will not recant."

"You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage."

"You can choose your neighbors, but you can't choose your family... It's sad."