8 Quotes by James V. Schall

Learning is very often a question of whether someone has his soul in order, whether he can be attracted by "what is." Great things will not be seen by those whose souls are not ordered. I did not say that first. Aristotle did. But I do not mind repeating it, as if I were the first to discover it. (The Life of the Mind)

Revelation, I argue, leads to the completion and fulfillment of political philosophy, not in any necessary or artificial way, but as an intelligible response to valid questions posed in the discipline itself. Revelation is a gift; it does not arise from human sources. It is not something that could be demanded or commanded. It is a rational gift. . . .Aquinas remains a key to the compatibility of reason and revelation. (At the Limits of Political Philosophy)

No serious book lover will ever die having read every book he has managed to collect. This is not a sign of dilatoriness but of eagerness, anticipation.

Thinking is itself, however, an adventure.

The cruelest form of death, I have no doubt, is not physical death. Rather it is that public death which comes from the killing of ideas about God.

Hell is a consequence of one’s own free choice. It would not exist if free choice did not exist or, better, if free choice were not used badly. It is not imposed arbitrarily from the outside by pitiless gods but grows logically from inside a human soul. It is the result of someone’s making himself what he wants to be, not what God wants him to be.

The truth will not only “make us free” but it is itself free. We all come in fact to know the same truth, otherwise we could not communicate at all with one another. This is why the modern-day denial of truth is, at the same time, a denial of real human communication and, consequently, in place of truth, an exhalation of power.

Self-discipline is the beginning of wisdom, not its end. When we have discovered the purpose for which self-discipline exists, we will, if we are sane, hardly recall anything about self-discipline because it has enabled us to become free to see and do so much else.