Jean Guitton Quotes

I have always made it a rule to speak in a timeless manner, true today, tomorrow and always.

Jewish thought was oriented towards the future. In the history of the past, it sought the image of what did not yet exist.

It is not enough for the past to be past. It must also be truly overcome – it must have lost all causal connection with the present – so that only the spiritual connection remains, which is the connection between image and reality, between figure and fulfilment.

What is the charm of a person? It is difficult to say, because charm is indefinable. It is a certain presence of the person beyond their limits, like the radiance of certain pure faces.

Discovering herself as the end of history, the Madonna now had the light to interpret the time that had gone before.

Teresa of Lisieux will give new splendour to the word. What she says, she does. And her words are oracles. I said “words”; I distinguish them from “phrases”. Teresa's phrases, in truth, are imperfect. Imperfect because of the weakness of men, who have given her a very mediocre language.

I find that at twent it is easy to be a hero, a saint, an extraordinary man. I believe, however, that at ninety it is very difficult to live up to the moment.

The Pope is unique. A man who, because of his position, is obliged to remain attached to “the ceiling”, to see things “from the ceiling's point of view”.

In Giovanna, purity was more than a virtue. It was her mark, her reason for existing and her implicit glory, her resemblance to the mother of Christ. Being a country girl, accustomed to seeing life in all its gestures, she probably had very accurate knowledge of purity in the physical sense. In the countryside, ignorance is never what the 19th-century bourgeoisie falsely calls innocence. And when, at the age of thirteen, Joan gave her virginity to God during the angel's first visit, she knew clearly what it meant. (p. 30)

L'ateismo non è soltanto macchinoso e raro, è anche un fenomeno recente, una bizzarria sostenuta da pochi e da poco tempo nel solo ambiente di certa intelligentia occidentale.

So today Mass risks resembling a liturgy of the word? A:

For a Christian, what we call life is a preparation for what we call the “afterlife”, the other life.

(Referring to Marthe Robin) was simple.... What prevailed in Marthe was her capacity for sacrifice, in imitation of Christ.... With simple words, she aroused in us one of those rare, sudden, sweet, somewhat melancholic and yet radiant emotions that make you aware of your destiny.

In the spiritual life, to grow means to simplify and simplify oneself, to become closer to uncreated and ineffable simplicity.

If the Church has sometimes been against science, the cause lies in its misreading of the Bible.