Morris West Quotes

In Switzerland everything that is not forbidden is legal.

After a death, you eat and drink and remember the good things and try to laugh again. Grief profits no one, least of all the departed, who are quit of it for ever.

We never escape our past. It is mirrored in our present. It repeats itself in our future.

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.

It doesn't matter what we believe about God. It's what He knows about us.

That's what faith is about — living with paradox.

"Forbear to ask what tomorrow may bring" … If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.

Once you accept the existence of God — however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him — then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things. You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage.

Who said to me, a foetus in the womb, a puling babe, "You have your life, but on the condition that you thus believe?" No one! Not even God! So gentlemen, I say you have no right to make terms for my life. I tell you then — No! I will not recant.

I'm a Nolan. I could dazzle you in dialect, because the words do not make the same sense to different men.

You I admire as being more, — much more — a man, and more believer too, than half the canting orthodox.

To make that long, last donkey-ride between the pikeman and the stake, to hear the shouting and the chant of hypocrites, to be a spectacle for animals in human masks!

I wonder how it will read five hundred years from now? — To make a man confess a loving God you burn him!

O Mother of Christ, who saw what men could do to one who heard an alien music! Bend to me, be tender. I am blind and deaf and dumb. And yet I do see visions, shout a kind of praise, feel in my pulse apocalyptic drums.

If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.