Morris West Quotes

Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!'''

No man — prince, peasant, pope, — has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy!"

There are a few of us — madmen all! — who are in love with knowing, who would sell the last shirt from our backs for one small truth, one tiny star-fire to light up the murk and mystery of what we call our life… We may go blind before we see it, that's the haunting —

It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment, or the courage, to pay the price…. One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return of love. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.

y el dinero. Lo conocía a fondo: el ritmo sin descanso, el olor, el sabor a sangre amarga, el acecho furtivo, el lenguaje que se hablaba en el mercado.

you will suffer something else: a psychic trauma, a personality change whose dimensions still elude full explanation. You will be emotionally fragile – as prone to tears as to rage. You will be subject to depressions, sudden, black and sometimes suicidal. At one moment you will be as dependent as a child, seeking reassurance after a nightmare. The next you will be angry and frustrated by your own impotence. Your short-term memory may be defective. Your tolerance of emotional stress will be greatly reduced. You will be strongly advised by the counsellors who will be working with

"El valor moral de un acto depende de la intención con que se realiza".

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

»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.

We are not a fortress Church. We are a Church of witness. What we do and say must be done in the light. ...We are therefore vulnerable to misquotation and misinterpretation... It is in this spirit of openness and charity and with prudent care, that I propose to examine all the functions of the decasteries.

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.

«Saben entendérselas con la muerte. Es la vida lo que los desconcierta.»

Me gusta caminar. Me gusta esta hora en que han salido las estrellas, los niños duermen y los centinelas están demasiado cansados como para vigilar atentamente. Es una hora de esperanzas. Todos necesitamos esperanzas.

Christ had made bishops and a Pope - but never a cardinal. Even the name held more than a hint of illusion - cardo, a hinge - as if they were the hinges on which he gates of Heaven were hung. Hinges they might be, but the hinges were useless metal, unless anchored firmly into the living fabric of the Church, whose stones were the poor, the humble, the ignorant, the sinning and the loving, the forgotten of the princes, but never the forgotten f God.

This was the man who, asked to compare the Greek practice of married clergy with the Roman one of clerical celibacy, had remarked: ‘We think ours works better. After all, if you want labourers in the vineyard, why stop them bringing their lunch?