The hoopla, the applause, the praises have never excited me.
Every duty, even the least duty, involves the whole principle of obedience.
Praise consists in the love of God, in wonder at the goodness of God, in recognition of the gifts of God, in seeing God in all things He gives us, ay, and even in the things that He refuses to us; so as to see our whole life in the light of God; and seeing this, to bless Him, adore Him, and glorify Him.
Gratitude consists of a watchful, minute attention to the particulars of our state, and to the multitudes of God's gifts, taken one by one. It fills us with a consciousness that God loves and cares for us, even to the least event and smallest need of life. It is a blessed thought that from our childhood God has been laying his fatherly hands upon us, and always in benediction, and that even the strokes of his hands are blessings, and among the chiefest we have ever received.
One must overcome history by dogma.
But the appeal to antiquity is both a treason and a heresy. It is a treason because it rejects the Divine voice of the Church at this hour, and a heresy because it denies that voice to be Divine. How can we know what antiquity was except through the Church?. . . I may say in strict truth that the Church has no antiquity. It rests upon its own supernatural and perpetual consciousness. . . . The only Divine evidence to us of what was primitive is the witness and voice of the Church at this hour.
Our character is our will; for what we will we are.
I think we don't need to be talking about hyphenated Americans, because we are all Americans, and we all want the same thing.
autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.
Satan is around y'all. Devil on your shoulder.
The past will not tell us what we ought to do, but. . . what we ought to avoid.