People think of faith as being something that you don't really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument...He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not be reason.

The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.

Christianity . . . sees the necessity for man to have spiritual values and it shows him how to get at those through physical sacraments.

[Pascal] was the first and perhaps is still the most effective voice to be raised in warning of the consequences of the enthronement of the human ego in contradistinction to the cross, symbolizing the ego's immolation. How beautiful it all seemed at the time of the Enlightenment, that man triumphant would bring to pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty, and beatitude in practice. But what a nightmare of wars, famines, and folly was to result therefrom.

All new news is old news happening to new people

There's a large strain of irony in our human affairs... Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence.

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.

When you reach your sixties you have to decide whether you're going to be a sot or an ascetic. In other words if you want to go on working after you're sixty some degree of asceticism is inevitable.

St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night in a second-class hotel.

St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.

Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time.

Good taste and humour are a contradiction in terms like a chaste whore.