I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.

From wonder into wonder existence opens.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

The book, ’12 Rules For Life,‘ is a very serious book. There’s elements of humor in it, but I’m trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it’s necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life, and why there’s hell to pay if you don’t do that.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.

I believe in God – not in a Catholic God; there is no Catholic God. There is God, and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.

Any man is liable to err, only a fool persists in error.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

It’s really easy to have a nice philosophy about openness, but moving the world in that direction is a different thing. It requires both understanding where you want to go and being pragmatic about getting there.

Isn’t it amazing that we are all made in God’s image, and yet there is so much diversity among his people?

Our God is a forgiving God.

Responsibility, I believe, accrues through privilege.

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.

If some people have the belief or view that the Dalai Lama has some miracle power, that’s totally nonsense.

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

I was raised in a religious environment, and my wife is one of the more religious people that I have ever known.

Necessity is not an established fact, but an interpretation.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

I dream of a church that is a mother and shepherdess.

We moralize among ruins.

Everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.

Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

God and I have a great relationship, but we both see other people.

Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.

Information is not knowledge.

I believe in innovation and that the way you get innovation is you fund research and you learn the basic facts.

In religious and in secular affairs, the more fervent beliefs attract followers. If you are a moderate in any respect – if you’re a moderate on abortion, if you’re a moderate on gun control, or if you’re a moderate in your religious faith – it doesn’t evolve into a crusade where you’re either right or wrong, good or bad, with us or against us.

Why is it that although it takes us years to get into our messes, we expect God to get us out of them in a few days?

Eternal nothingness is fine if you happen to be dressed for it.

Thought is the parent of the deed.

No man is much good unless he believes in God and obeys His laws.

Nothing exists from whose nature some effect does not follow.

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.

There is no love of life without despair of life.

Religion is not a department of life; it is something that enters into the whole of it.

All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

I’ve been saying for a couple of years now that people need to let God out of the Sunday morning box, that He doesn’t want to just be with you for an hour or two on Sunday morning and then put back in His box to sit there until you have an emergency, but He wants to invade your Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.

When I was very young I was sort of floored by the fact that my mother and my father and everyone I knew was going to die one day, and myself too. I had a sort of a philosophical crisis. I couldn’t believe that we were mortal.

The gospel to me is simply irresistible.

A lot of churches have not moved with the times.

This is the truth: as from a fire aflame thousands of sparks come forth, even so from the Creator an infinity of beings have life and to him return again.

We clearly see in God’s Word that anything He tells us to do, He will give us the ability to do it. But do we really believe it? Do we want to believe it? It’s easier to come up with excuses for why we can’t do things that are hard or that we really don’t want to do.

To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

What if others suffer shipwreck, yet none that sail with Jesus have ever been stranded yet.

The universe as we know it is a joint product of the observer and the observed.

A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges is not Christian. This is not in the Gospel.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Premature certainty is the enemy of the truth.

If you want to become fully mature in the Lord, you must learn to love truth. Otherwise, you will always leave open a door of deception for the enemy to take what is meant to be yours.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics – a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage – surely that proves that you are in the right?

The earth belongs to the living, not to the dead.

You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.

Every day is a gift from God. Learn to focus on the Giver and enjoy the gift!

My children, to the extent that they have found religion, have found it from me, in that I insist on at least a modicum of religious education for them.