Morris West Quotes

Because I am a man, I have experience f fear, love and death Because I have been, like you, a political an, I understand the usages of power and its limitations, to! Because I am a Minister of the Word, I know that I am peddling a folly in the market place and that I risk to be stoned for it. You, too, my friends are peddling follies - monstrous insanities - and all of us rish to perish by them!

»En todas partes el hombre ha tomado conciencia de sí mismo como un animal de tránsito y lucha desesperadamente por afirmar su derecho a lo mejor del mundo durante el breve período que habita en él.

They're a migratory tribe, so you find them everywhere […] They're hardy, longevitous, resistant to infection by disease or new ideas, little modified by regional influences. The accent drifts a bit, maybe. The dialect adapts itself to the local patois: but that's a chameleon's trick: protective colouring, no more. The rest of it, the sinuous mind, the easy passion, the leery eye, the ready smile, the fine, swaggering, billycock-and-shillelagh walk, the flexible moralities, the bel canto oratory, the black bilious angers, these never change.

We are ants on the carcass of the world, spawned out of nothing, going busily nowhere. One of us dies, the others crawl over us to the pickings.

Every tribe in the world had its own version of the scapegoat, marked for exile or persecution when the homefolk needed to purge themselves of their own guilts.

"Predicamos la caridad y la compasión, pero raras veces lo que significan".

What the Court will decide is another matter - a legality, based on the canonical rules of evidence, and irrelevant, it seems to me, to the fundamental facts, that the finger of God is here and tat the heaven of goodness in this man is still working in the lives of his people.

I don't like making pacts with tomorrow. I want today — just as it is, good and bad. I feel safe that way. I don't want to face the great perhaps.

alegría es un don que se acepta con agradecimiento y sin intentar pagarlo, así como no se intenta pagar la luz del sol ni el canto de los pájaros.

He had fallen into the error of all liberals: the belief that men are prepared to reform themselves, that good will attracts good will, that truth has leavening virtue of its own.

If his time must be shortened, then he wanted to spend the last of it in the soft air of England, to walk the downs and the beechwoods and hear the elegiac song of the nightingales in the shadow of the old churches, where Death was more familiar and more friendly because the English had spent centuries teaching him politeness.

I know what you are thinking - you need a sign. What better one could I give than to make this little one whole and new? I could do it, but I will not. I am the Lord and not a conjurer. I gave this mite a gift I denied to all of you - eternal innocence. To you, he looks imperfect but to me he is flawless like the bud that dies unopened or the fledgling that falls from the nest to be devoured by the ants. He will never offend me, as all of you have done. He will never pervert or destroy the work of my Father's hands. He is necessary to you. He will evoke the kindness that will keep you human. His infirmity will prompt you to gratitude for your own good fortune. More! He will remind you every day that I am who I am, that my ways are not yours, and that the smallest dust mite, while in darkest space, does not fall out of my hand. I have chosen you. You have not chosen me. This little one is my sign to you. Treasure him!

He spoke a kind of ecclesiastical jargon; a debased rhetoric that explained nothing but brought the truth into disrepute. It begged all the questions and answered none. The massive structure of reason and revelation on which the church was founded was reduced to ritual incantation, formless, fruitless and essentially false. Peppermint piety. It deceived no one but the man who peddled it. It satisfied no one but old ladies and girls in green-sickness; yet it flourished most rankly where the Church was most firmly entrenched in the established order. It was the mark of accommodation, compromise, laxity among the clergy, who find it easier to preach devotion than to affront the moral and social problems of the time. It covered fatuity and lack of education. It left people naked and unarmed in the face of terrifying mysteries: pain, passion, death and the great perhaps of the hereafter.

In Switzerland everything that is not forbidden is legal.

If prayer fails I am in a greater darkness yet, not knowing whether I have presumed too much or believed too little.