Coventry Patmore Quotes

Books are influential in proportion to their obscurity, provided that the obscurity be that of inexpressible Realities. The Bible is the most obscure book in the world. He must be a great fool who thinks he understands the plainest chapter of it.

Religion is not religion until it has become, not only natural, but so natural that nothing else seems natural in its presence.

Holy indignation is a proof that we should do the same thing ourselves, and easy tears are a certain sign of a hard heart.

If you try to simplify or pare off the superfluous from the minds and speech of most men, you will find that nothing is left. There is no simplicity in them, for there is no truth; truth and simplicity being, as Aquinas says, the same thing.

The moods of love are like the wind,
And none know whence or why they rise.

What seems to us for us is true.
The planet has no proper light,
And yet when Venus is in view,
No primal star is half so bright.

The impurity of ignorance is in none so manifest as in the devout; for they act on their ignorance, and fill themselves and others with miserable scruples and hard thoughts of God, and are as apt to call good evil as other men are to call evil good.

I vowed unvarying faith, and she
To whom in full I pay that vow,
Rewards me with variety
Which men who change can never know.

The difference between a commonly well-behaved woman and a high-bred lady consists in very small things—but what a difference it is!

She is both heaven and the way.

Having my law the seventh time disobey'd,
I struck him, and dismiss'd
With hard words and unkiss'd,
—His Mother, who was patient, being dead.

The Catholic Church itself has been nearly killed by the infection of the puritanism of the Reformation.

The midge's wing beats to and fro
A thousand times ere one can utter "O!"

Good people and religious are the first to say, "He hath a devil" of any one whose way is widely different from and maybe greatly higher than their own.

Life is not life at all without delight.