Falling in love is very real, but I used to shake my head when people talked about soul mates, poor deluded individuals grasping at some supernatural ideal not intended for mortals but sounded pretty in a poetry book. Then, we met, and everything changed, the cynic has become the converted, the sceptic, an ardent zealot.

Love, like everything else in life, should be a discovery, an adventure, and like most adventures, you don’t know you’re having one until you’re right in the middle of it.

... it’s a blessed thing to love and feel loved in return.

Socrates: Have you noticed on our journey how often the citizens of this new land remind each other it is a free country? Plato: I have, and think it odd they do this.Socrates: How so, Plato?Plato: It is like reminding a baker he is a baker, or a sculptor he is asculptor.Socrates: You mean to say if someone is convinced of their trade, they haveno need to be reminded.Plato: That is correct.Socrates: I agree. If these citizens were convinced of their freedom, they would not need reminders.

An acquaintance merely enjoys your company, a fair-weather companion flatters when all is well, a true friend has your best interests at heart and the pluck to tell you what you need to hear.

Errors do not cease to be errors simply because they’re ratified into law.

It’s not unpatriotic to denounce an injustice committed on our behalf, perhaps it’s the most patriotic thing we can do.

The devil has not vanished simply because people refuse to believe he exists, no more than God has...

Poor God, how often He is blamed for all the suffering in theworld. It’s like praising Satan for allowing all the good that happens.

If Christ is God, He cannot sin, and if suffering was a sin in and by itself, He could not have suffered and died for us. However, since He took the most horrific death to redeem us, He showed us in fact that suffering and pain have great power.

It is unfortunate that in most cases when the sins of the father fall on the son it is because unlike God, people refuse to forgive and forget and heap past wrongs upon innocent generations.

If a man cannot serve two masters, neither can Christianity, or several thousand of them as the case may be.

It was not curiosity that killed the goose who laid the golden egg, but an insatiable greed that devoured common sense.

... what you think is right isn't the same as knowing what is right.

Make your lives a masterpiece, you only get one canvas.

If you boil it down, just because someone else does the wrong thing we are not exempt from doing what’s right.

Sweetheart, darling, dearest, it was funny to think that these endearments, which used to sound exceedingly sentimental in movies and books, now held great importance, simple but true verbal affirmations of how they felt for each other. They were words only the heart could hear and understand, words that could impart entire pentameter sonnets in their few, short syllables.

...it’s just another one of those things I don’t understand: everyone impresses upon you how unique you are, encouraging you to cultivate your individuality while at the same time trying to squish you and everyone else into the same ridiculous mould. It’s an artist’s right to rebel against the world’s stupidity.

Evil influence is like a nicotine patch, you cannot help but absorb what sticks to you.

They said I would never live. I lived. They said I would never think. I think. They said I would never walk. I walked. They said I would never dance, but I never danced anyway.

... how terrible is the pain of the mind and heart when the freedom of mankind is suppressed!

There has to be a cut-off somewhere between the freedom of expression and a graphically explicit free-for-all.

Since art is considered a noble field, art should be used to promote all that is good and noble, and in a noble fashion.

I wanted to shut my mind, that my thoughts might closeon my own peace, I wanted to closethe peace of my love in my heartlike dew in a dark rose."From "Philip Speaks

Powerful to alleviate, to delay, to camouflage, though money is, in the end it lets us down.

That's it. Love makes us all strong.

... a true friend has your best interests at heart and the pluck to tell you what you need to hear.

In fine, a life of good or evil, the hope of Heaven or the despair of Hell, Faustus stands as a reminder that the choice between these two absolutes also falls to us.

... love for our neighbours does not die the minute we enter heaven, it intensifies.

The gates of Hell are terrible to behold, are they not?

There are many forms of tyrants, but there are none so terrible as those stifling their own people in the name of freedom.

What could there be in this document written by a young girl in 1917?

Heaven is not a republic.

Soeur Marie Emelie"Soeur Marie Emelieis little and very old:her eyes are onyx,and her cheeks vermilion,her apron wide and kindand cobalt blue.She comfortsgenerations and generationsof children,who are "new"at the convent school.When they are eight,they are already up to her shoulder,they grow up and go into the world,she remains,forever,always incredibly old,but incredibly never older...She has an affinity with the hens,When a hen dies,she sits down on a bench and cries,she is the only grown-up, whose tears are not frightening tears.Children can weep without shame, at her side...Soeur Marie Emelie...her apron as wide and kindas skies on a summer dayand as clean and blue.

There is only one misery . . . not to be saints.

Reflect carefully on this, for it is so important that I can hardly lay too much stress on it. Fix your eyes on the Crucified and nothing else will be of much importance to you.

...it takes great humility to find oneself unjustly condemned and be silent, and to do this is to imitate the Lord Who set us free from all our sins. ... The truly humble person will have a genuine desire to be thought little of, and persecuted, and condemned unjustly, even in serious matters. ... It is a great help to meditate upon the great gain which in any case this is bound to bring us, and to realize how, properly speaking, we can never be blamed unjustly, since we are always full of faults, and a just man falls seven times a day, so that it would be a falsehood for us to say we have no sin. If, then, we are not to blame for the thing that we are accused of, we are never wholly without blame in the way that our good Jesus was. ... Thou knowest, my Good, that if there is anything good in me it comes from no other hands than Thine own. For what is it to Thee, Lord, to give much instead of little? True, I do not deserve it, but neither have I deserved the favors which Thou hast shown me already. Can it be that I should wish a thing so evil as myself to be thought well of by anyone, when they have said such wicked things of Thee, Who art good above all other good? ... Do Thou give me light and make me truly to desire that all should hate me, since I have so often let Thee, Who hast loved me with such faithfulness. ... What does it matter to us if we are blamed by them all, provided we are without blame in the sight of the Lord? ...meditate upon what is real and upon what is not. ... Do you suppose, ... that, if you do not make excuses for yourself, there will not be someone else who will defend you? Remember how the Lord took the Magdalen's part in the Pharisee's house and also when her sister blamed her. He will not treat you as rigorously as He treated Himself: it was not until He was on the Cross that He had even a thief to defend Him. His Majesty, then, will put it into somebody's mind to defend you; if He does not, it will be because there is no need. ...be glad when you are blamed, and in due time you will see what profit you experience in your souls. For it is in this way that you will begin to gain freedom; soon you will not care if they speak ill or well of you; it will seem like someone else's business. ... So here: it becomes such a habit with us not to reply that it seems as if they are not addressing us at all. This may seem impossible to those of us who are very sensitive and not capable of great mortification. It is indeed difficult at first, but I know that, with the Lord's help, the gradual attainment of this freedom, and of renunciation and self-detachment, is quite possible.

One day, when I thought I was alone, I prayed in church. While making this offering before the cross, a parishioner came up to me, put her arm around my shoulder and prayed, ‘Dear God, please heal Father Jim. And give me his cancer.’ I was incredulous. I looked at her, and then back to the Lord and quietly prayed, ‘If she insists, Lord, hear our prayer!’ Later I was able to pray, ‘Lord, rather than give my cancer to her, give her heart of love to me – the love that prompted her to deny her very self and pray in such a loving way.

Christ has come into the world to lay out a garden wherein, amid splendor and abundance, there should thrive the violet of humanity, the myrtle of mortification, the rose of love, the lily of virginal souls, the laurel of confessors and the palm of martyrs.

The sense of the joy in anything is the sense of Christ.

You cannot sodomize a Sacrament and expect God to say, 'Well done.

Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover himself becomes new. It is literally like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green shoots of life.

Broken things are precious. We eat broken bread because we share in the depth of our Lord and His broken life. Broken flowers give perfume. Broken incense is used in adoration. A broken ship saved Paul and many other passengers on their way to Rome. Sometimes the only way the good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them.