Charles Baudelaire Quotes

Father asked us what was God's noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad, but babies never are.

The traditional Christian attitude toward human personality was that human nature was essentially good and that it was formed and modified by social pressures and training.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

Affliction is a school of virtue; it corrects levity, and interrupts the confidence of sinning.

It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.

Uncontrolled technology can certainly bring down disaster, perhaps irreparable, on our race. The only protection against it is a growth in man's spiritual and moral maturity proportionate to his growth in technical skill and power.

The progress made in refinement of manners and morals seems to have gone on simultaneously with the improvement in arts, manufactures and commerce. It moved slowly at first, but has been constantly increasing in velocity…. we are a much better people than we were then, better instructed, more sincere and kind-hearted, less gross and brutal, and have fewer of the concomitant vices of a less civilized state.

Christianity has found its triumphs and shown its fruits in every nation and tribe upon the globe; and its results have been in every case the same. Virtue, social order, prosperity, blessedness, the elevation and improvement, in all respects, of the human life, are the uniform and exclusive inheritance of those who receive the gospel.

Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.

We are perfect. According to God, we are perfect, yet we know that we are sinners. We believe in the fact that we are both saints and sinners at the same time as we live in this world.

The more we become civilized, the more we simultaneously understand our need to be virtuous and our need to understand our experiences on a subconscious level.

Although a man has so well purged his mind that nothing can trouble or deceive him any more, yet he reached his present innocence through sin.

Morality can muddle mystical understanding and virtue is only necessary in so far as it favours success. All wisdom must be encompassed in order to achieve enlightenment.

Grace is the mother and nurse of holiness, and not the apologist of sin.

And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.

If reason dominates in man, he rises higher than angels. If lust overpowers man, he descends lower than the beast.

The saint endeavors to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall.

My faith reminds me that we all are sinners.

Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you.

We're not the paragons of virtue that we'd all like to think we are. And so, to shatter that myth, God will use suffering to expose the stuff of which we're made.

We may learn by practice such things upon earth as shall be of use to us in heaven. Piety, unostentatious piety, is never out of place.

To me a saint is a severely edited sinner. That's what I think.

The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.

To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it. Throughout his life on earth, Jesus resisted every impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good.

Evil things are easy things: for they are natural to our fallen nature. Right things are rare flowers that need cultivation.