Faith, Spirituality and Religion

Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

Generally speaking, the errors of religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

Never lose a holy curiosity.

A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.

It seems to me that the most universal revolutionary wish now or ever is a wish for heaven, a wish by a human being to be honored by angels for something other than beauty or usefulness.

There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.

Teaching is an act of love, a spiritual cohabitation, one of the few sacred relationships left in a crass secular world.

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.

Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.

You can’t pray a lie.

Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention— on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God— that he completely forgets his own ego and desires, he is praying.

Politics is a game of compromise . . . faith isn’t.

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

The true believer is in a high degree protected against the danger of certain neurotic afflictions; by accepting the universal neurosis he is spared the task of forming a personal neurosis.

I had always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.

A noble aim, Faithfully kept, is as a noble deed, In whose pure sight all virtue doth succeed.

Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.

The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.

Gambling promises the poor what Property performs for the rich: that is why the bishops dare not denounce it fundamentally.

We admit that when the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible we crucified it.

Greatness is the secular name for Divinity: both mean simply what lies beyond us.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.