Quote collection
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"Ultimately, however, conflict lies not in objective reality, but in people's heads. Truth is simple one argument - perhaps a good one, perhaps not - for dealing with the difference. The difference itself exists because it exists in their thinking."
"I myself saw and touched at Dessay, a child of this sort, which had no human parents, but had proceeded from the Devil. He was twelve years old, and, in outward form, exactly resembled ordinary children."
"The Devil...clutched hold of the miserable young man...and flew off with him through the ceiling, since which time nothing has been heard of him."
"The Devil, it is true, is not exactly a doctor who has taken degrees, but he is very learned, very expert for all that. He has not been carrying on his business during thousands of years for nothing."
"The Devil, too, sometimes steals human children; it is not infrequent for him to carry away infants within the first six weeks after birth, and to substitute in their place imps."
"God scorns and mocks the devil, in setting under his very nose a poor, weak, human creature, mere dust and ashes, yet endowed with the firstfruits of the Spirit, against whom the devil can do nothing."
"The winds are nothing else but good or bad spirits. Hark! how the Devil is puffing and blowing."
"To be a Christian, you must pluck out the eye of reason."
"I almost feel like throwing Jimmy into the stove, as the priest in Kulenberg did."
"A wicked tyrant is better than a wicked war."
"Men are so delving into the mysteries of things that today a boy of twenty knows more than twenty doctors formerly knew."
"Nothing is more sweet than harmony in marriage, and nothing more distressing than dissension."
"The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of mere gain."
"And I myself, in Rome, heard it said openly in the streets, "If there is a hell, then Rome is built on it."
"Men are not made religious by performing certain actions which are externally good, but they must first have righteous principles, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions."
"We refuse to have our conscience bound by any work or law, so that by doing this or that we should be righteous, or leaving this or that undone we should be damned."
"Of all deadly sins, this is the most deadly, namely, that any one should think he is not guilty of a damnable and deadly sin before God."
"Count it one of the highest virtues upon earth to educate faithfully the children of others, which so few, and scarcely any, do by their own."
"While we contemplate in all creatures, as in a mirror, those immense riches of His wisdom, justice, goodness and power, we should not meerly run them over cursorily, and, so to speak, with a fleeting glance, but we should ponder them at length, turn them over in our mind seriously and faithfully and recollect them repeatedly."
"Angels are our true and trusty servants, performing offices and works that one poor miserable mendicant would be ashamed to do for another."