“We become like that which we love. If we love what is base, we become base; but if we love what is noble, we become noble.”

Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them.

Freedom does not mean that right to do whatever we please, but rather to do as we ought. The right to do whatever we please reduces freedom to a physical power and forgets that freedom is a moral power.

It was to a virgin woman that the birth of the Son of God was announced. It was to a fallen woman that his resurrection was announced.

Prayer begins by talking to God, but it ends by listening to Him. In the face of Absolute Truth, silence is the soul’s language.

It is not particularly difficult to find thousands who will spend two or three hours a day in exercising, but if you ask them to bend their knees to God in five minutes of prayer they protest that it is too long.

Hearing nuns’ confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.

Nothing is more destined to create deep-seated anxieties in people than the false assumption that life should be free from anxieties.

Believe the incredible and you can do the impossible.

If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself.

It’s impossible to lose your footing when you’re on your knees.

If we wish to have the light, we must keep the sun; if we wish to keep our forests we must keep our trees; if we wish to keep our perfumes, we must keep our flowers- and if we wish to keep our rights, then we must keep our God.

Let those who think that the Church pays too much attention to Mary give heed to the fact that Our Blessed Lord Himself gave ten times as much of His life to her as He gave to His Apostles.

There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.

Most commit the same mistake with God that they do with their friends: they do all the talking.

All badness is spoiled goodness. A bad apple is a good apple that became rotten. Because evil has no capital of its own, it is a parasite that feeds on goodness.

Each of us comes into life with fists closed, set for aggressiveness and acquisition. But when we abandon life our hands are open; there is nothing on earth that we need, nothing the soul can take with it.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

There is no greater mistake in life than seeing things or hearing them at the wrong time.

Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.

Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit.

A great stench will come from Lausanne, but they will not know its origin; they will put out all people from distant places, fire seen in the sky, a foreign nation defeated.

Courage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.

I have learned to use the word ‘impossible’ with the greatest caution.

A common soldier will make an empire, but he will eventually meet his fate and be condemned to the Great Rock.