“A holy woman may be beautiful by the gift of nature, but she must not give occasion to lust. If beauty be hers, so far from setting it off she ought rather to obscure it.”

Arguments about Scripture achieve nothing but a stomachache and a headache.

Daily, every moment, prayer is necessary to men.

Where our joy is, there should our work be.

I believe because it is absurd.

The more you mow us down, the more numerous we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.

You can’t undo anything you’ve already done, but you can face up to it. You can tell the truth. You can seek forgiveness. And then let God do the rest.

The Christian does not hurt even his enemy.

The pleasure of those who injure you lies in your pain. Therefore they will suffer if you take away their pleasure by not feeling pain.

You cannot parcel out freedom in pieces because freedom is all or nothing.

God the Father’s a deep root; the Son’s the shoot that breaks into the world; the Spirit spreads the beauty & fragrance.

Truth engenders hatred of truth. As soon as it appears, it is the enemy.

The state of faith allows no mention of impossibility.

Discipline is an index to doctrine.

The first reaction to truth is hatred.

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

The Son of God died; it is by all means to be believed because it is absurd. And he was buried and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible.

Anything forced is not beautiful.

Nature is beautiful because it looks like Art; and Art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as Art while yet it looks like Nature.

Beauty is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealment.

Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living – and the Ideal shames us all.

Look closely. The beautiful may be small.

When I spoke of “beauty”, I was thinking of Rilke’s notion that the beautiful is nothing but the beginning of the terrible, and of Hölderlin’s idea that the beautiful can unite extreme opposites in intimacy.

Beauty presents an indeterminate concept of Understanding, the sublime an indeterminate concept of Reason.

Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful, and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.