24 Quotes by Antonin Sertillanges

The more a man departs from lawful authority, that is, authority normally constituted, whether by God or by the nature of things, the more he is obliged to fall back into arbitrary claims to authority.

To upset the order of nature, and even more the order of God, who, for us, is more natural than nature itself, is to destroy the harmony of forces; and violence, unbending against the rebellion of things, against the more terrible rebellion of souls, is the only refuge of him who wishes to maintain unity at all costs.

Variety is precious when it expresses nature more richly by developing various aspects of it; but the variety that consists in producing cripples and abortions instead of normal human beings has nothing to commend it to the lover of mankind.

How puerile it would be, and what a dangerous heresy from the religious point of view, to believe that passion in its proper place is offensive to God! We are not Manicheans, that we should incline to believe that the flesh is under a curse, and that all matter springs from the Principle of Evil. Rather do we say that matter and the flesh come from God

Whoever expresses truth expresses God, the Word, and utters therefore a word of God.

We hear our legislators proclaim unceasingly their respect for the individual conscience, though it be a religious conscience, and themselves anticlericals.All the same, all their efforts tend to, dissociate us, and to reduce us to the state of amorphous dust. They can bear no organised society other than what they call a lay society no government other than their government and no social finality other than their temporal aspirations.

We must beware of yielding to the pressure of a spirit of cowardly conformity which proclaims itself everybody’s friend in the hope that everybody will obligingly return the compliment.

Truth serves only its slaves.

Courage is sustained by calling up anew the vision of the goal.