My family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering.

[At the Garden of Olives Monastery] "Why are you all so quiet all the time?" I say, still whispering at him in this hoarse voice. "We are teachers and workers," he says, "not talkers." "Workers, O.K.," I say, "but how can a teacher be quiet all the time and teach anybody anything?" "Christ was the best," he says, thinking of something. "He lived thirty-three years. Thirty years he kept quiet; three years he talked. Ten to one for keeping quiet.".

Go on, get out. Last words are for fools who haven't said enough.

The mistletoe hung in the castle hall, The holly branch shone on the old oak wall.

I have offended reputation, A most unnoble swerving.

We should face reality and our past mistakes in an honest, adult way. Boasting of glory does not make glory, and singing in the dark does not dispel fear.

A skeptic is a person who, when he sees the handwriting on the wall, claims it is a forgery.

The Farmer and the Snake One winter a Farmer found a Snake stiff and frozen with cold. He had compassion on it, and taking it up, placed it in his bosom. The Snake was quickly revived by the warmth, and resuming its natural instincts, bit its benefactor, inflicting on him a mortal wound. Oh, cried the Farmer with his last breath, I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel. The greatest kindness will not bind the ungrateful.

Call it Nature, Fate, Fortune; all these are names of the one and selfsame God.

Faith is not contrary to reason….

When all else is lost, the future still remains.

God made bees, and bees made honey, God made man, and man made money, Pride made the devil, and the devil made sin; So God made a cole-pit to put the devil in. - transcribed by James Henry Dixon,

It would have been as though he were in a boat of stone with masts of steel, sails of lead, ropes of iron, the devil at the helm, the wrath of God for a breeze, and hell for his destination.

Good men prefer to be accountable.

The economic and technological triumphs of the past few years have not solved as many problems as we thought they would, and, in fact, have brought us new problems we did not foresee.

We are all in the same boat in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

If you are living out of a sense of obligation you are slave.

Commemoration of John Bosco, Priest, Founder of the Salesian Teaching Order, 1888 In his experience of God, a Christian has a strong sense of his individuality, never of his unity with God. Expressed more sharply, he has a strong sense of the Creator-creature distinction, never of merging or absorption. Or, to put it more sharply still, a Christian has a sense of his moral sin and not just of his metaphysical smallness in the face of the beyond. The dilemma for man is not who he is but what he has done. His predicament is not that he is small, but that he is sinful.

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, From the seas and the streams; I bear light shade for the leaves when laid In their noonday dreams. From my wings are shaken the dews that waken The sweet buds every one, When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, As she dances about the sun. I wield the flail of the lashing hail, And whiten the green plains under, And then again I dissolve it in rain, And laugh as I pass in thunder.

Our wanton accidents take root, and grow To vaunt themselves God's laws.