488 Quotes About Catholicism

Youth was not made for pleasure, but for heroism.

Nietzsche, in cursing our age, sees in it the heritage of the Gospel, while Dostoevsky, cursing it just as vigorously, sees in it the result of a denial of the Gospel

For that holy and prudent man knew that to admit the notion of piety is nothing other than that everything is received by faith from the fathers and consigned by the same faith to the sons and [piety is] not our religion, which we want, that leads but more that which leads must be followed, for it is proper to Christian modesty and gravity not to pass on his own beliefs to those who come after him, but to preserve what has been received from his ancestors.

He was not even a Catholic, yet that was the only ghost of a code that he had, the gaudy, ritualistic, paradoxical Catholicism whose prophet was Chesterton, whose claqueurs were such reformed rakes of literature as Huysmans and Bourget, whose American sponsor was Ralph Adams Cram, with his adulation of thirteenth-century cathedrals--a Catholicism which Amory found convenient and ready-made, without priest or sacraments or sacrifice.

Sometimes we think that the most important thing in our life is body health, and it is not. The most important thing is our existential dialogue with God, our constant response to God with prayer and works.

And why not—whatever despair we may feel concerning resurrection and reassemblage—find comic relief in the human determination to assert wholeness in the face of inevitable decay and fragmentation?

I expect that in Heaven, the angels will sing Bach, and they'll envy us our understanding of Beethoven. The unfallen angels don't have to go through the first movements of the 9th symphony to get to the Ode to Joy. But we do.

All Christians in any state or walk of life are called to the fullness of Christian life and to the perfection of charity. ... In order to reach this perfection the faithful should use the strength dealt out to them by Christ's gift, so that ... doing the will of the Father in everything, they may wholeheartedly devote themselves to the glory of God and to the service of their neighbor.

[O]ften men, deceived by the Evil One, have become vain in their reasonings and have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, serving the creature rather than the Creator. […] By the proclamation of the Gospel… [the Church] gives [non-Christians] the dispositions necessary for baptism, snatches them from the slavery of error and of idols and incorporates them in Christ…