The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Morris West

If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm you’ll never enjoy the sunshine.

One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing.

courage, darkness, doubt, inspirational, knowing, life, living-life-to-the-fullest, poetic, risk

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.

aldo-meyer, communism, liberalism

I believe in saints as I believe in sanctity. I believe in miracles as I believe in God, who can suspend the laws of His own making. But I believe, too, that the hand of God writes plainly and simply, for all men of good will to read. I am doubtful of His presence in confusion and conflicting voices.

bishop-aurelio, christianity, doubt, god, miracles

Even in sin, the act of love -done with love- is shadowed with divinity. Its conformity may be at fault, but its nature is not altered, and its nature is creative, communicative, splendid in surrender. It was in the splendor of my surrender to Nina and she to me, that I first understood how a man might surrender himself to God -if a God existed. The moment of love is a moment of union -of body and spirit- and the act of faith is mutual and implicit.

faith, giacomo-nerone, god, sex, sexuality

I can’t tell you why God made you the way you are any more than I can tell you why he’s planted a carcinoma in my stomach to make me die painfully while other men die peacefully in their sleep. The cogs of creation seem to slip all the time. Babies are born with two heads, mothers of families run crazy with carving knives, men die in plague, famine and thunderstorms. Why? Only God knows.

blaise-meredith, christianity, creation, god

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

blaise-meredith, faith, prayer

I feel the life slipping out of me. When the pain comes, I cry out, but there is no prayer in it, only fear. I kneel and recite my office and the Rosary but the words are empty – dry gourds rattling in the silence. The dark is terrible and I feel so alone. I see no signs but the symbols of contradiction. I try to dispose myself to faith, hope and charity, but my will is a blown reed in the winds of despair.

blaise-meredith, christianity, faith, prayer

Each of us can walk only the path he sees at his own feet. Each of us is subject to the consequences of his own belief.

belief, giacomo-nerone

I was lost a long time, without knowing it. Without the Faith, one is free, and that is a pleasant feeling at first. There are no questions of conscience, no constraints, except the constraints of custom, convention and the law, and these are flexible enough for most purposes. It is only later that terror comes. One is free – but free in chaos, in an unexplained and unexplainable world. One is free in a desert, from which there is no retreat but inward, toward the hollow core of oneself. There is nothing to build on but the small rock of one’s own pride, and this is a nothing, based on nothing… I think, therefore I am. But what am I? An accident of disorder, going no place.

atheism, belief, giacomo-nerone

I don’t believe in miracles, only unexplained facts.

aldo-meyer, belief, miracles

I feel the life slipping out of me. When the pain comes, I cry out, but there is no prayer in it, only fear. I kneel and recite my office and the Rosary but the words are empty – dry gourds rattling in the silence. The dark is terrible and I feel so alone. I see no signs but the symbols of contradiction. I try to dispose myself to faith, hope and charity, but my will is a blown reed in the winds of despair.

blaise-meredith, christianity, faith, prayer