All these new methods of how to build the church has left me confused.
But the great leveler, Death: not even the gods can defend a man, not even one they love, that day when fate takes hold and lays him out at last.
God does not know whether a skin is black or white, He sees only souls.
One little human truth is that opinionated people don't hold much with other people's opinions, and it is a great pleasure to some of them to be able to ascribe incurable defects, such as belonging to a certain sex; or base motives, or lack of understanding, to anyone whose views they disagree with.
Even St. Teresa said, "I can pray better when I'm comfortable," and she refused to wear her haircloth shirt or starve herself. I don't think living in cellars and starving is better for an artist than it is for anybody else.
I love to praise what I love, and I won't for a minute believe that love is blind -- indeed, it gives clearness without sharpness, and surely that is the best light in which to look at anything.
I have a great deal of religious symbolism in my stories because I have a very deep sense of religion and also I have a religious training. And I suppose you don't say, `I'm going to have the flowering judas tree stand for betrayal,' but of course it does.
A single word has sometimes lost or won an empire.
Pleasure and guilt are synonymous terms in the language of the monks, and they discovered, by experience, that rigid fasts, and abstemious diet, are the most effectual preservatives against the impure desires of the flesh.
We are saved by grace, not by the works of the law. But don't be so quick to write the law off.
Rains driven by storms fall not perpetually on the land already sodden, neither do varying gales for ever disturb the Caspian sea.