Quotes from Robert Farrar Capon

The human race is positively addicted to keeping records and remembering scores. What we call our "life" is, for the most part, simply the juggling of accounts in our heads. And yet, if God has announced anything in Jesus, it is that he, for one, has pensioned off the bookkeeping department permanently.

If you take all your meals seriously, none of them gets a chance to matter.

Grace doesn't sell; you can hardly even give it away, because it works only for losers and no one wants to stand in their line. The world of winners will buy case lots of moral advice, grosses of guilt-edged prohibitions, skids of self-improvement techniques, and whole truckloads of transcendental hot air. But it will not buy free forgiveness because that threatens to let the riffraff into the Supper of the Lamb.

Goodness itself, in other words, if it is sufficiently committed to plausible, right-handed, strong-arm methods, will in the very name of goodness do all and more than all that evil ever had in mind.

Let a woman learn only a handful of basic finishes for her meat, and she will become a cook instead of a housewife. Butter and cream, for example. What chicken is there - what veal, what pork - indeed, what shrimp, scallops, oysters, or clams, that will not come to a glorious end if, five minutes before they leave the stove, they are graced with a lump of butter and as many tablespoons of cream as can be spared?

And the sad fact is that the church, both now and at far too many times in its history, has found it easier to act as if it were selling the sugar of moral and spiritual achievement rather than the salt ofJesus' passion and death.

Always remember, you don't need bad people to get bad deeds done. All you need is somebody clever enough to convince good people that a nefarious policy is actually the greatest thing since the pop-up toaster. As I have frequently observed, most of the serious evils in the world have been done in the name of good.

Grace perennially waits for us to accept our destruction and, in that acceptance, to discover the power of the Resurrection and the Life.

Your stew, so long deferred, stands finally extra causas. Greet it as your fellow creature. It is as deliciously unnecessary as you are.

Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than useful.

What it leads to is the mischief of confusing liturgy with magic -- of imagining there are only a handful of properly effective formulas for conjuring up the mystery, when in fact the mystery is always at work, independent of any formula whatsoever.

One real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world.

Keep a spirited Christian horse and a useful ethical donkey. But don't try to breed a mule.

the proper self-knowledge and self-love of every created thing is ipso facto a participation in the knowledge and love of God. The entire universe moves by desire for the Highest Good simply because every part of it loves what God loves - namely, its own being.

God does not punish people for being nonpacifists; war alone is punishment enough.

If you take the view that one of the chief objects in life is to remain in loving relationships with other people, straight-line power becomes useless.

What role have I left for religion? None. And I have left none because the Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ leaves none. Christianity is not a religion; it is the announcement of the end of religion.

The world has taken a five-thousand-year bath in wisdom and is just as grimy as ever.

cover each with plastic wrap (you see, I hope, that I am no mere antiquarian, insisting on barefoot walks through unimproved sculleries. I am as grateful as anyone for real progress as any modernist. More so, perhaps. Anything that preserves freshness for the pot is on the side of the angels.

Women are like cheese strudels. When first baked, they are crisp and fresh on the outside, but the filling is unsettled and indigestible; in age, the crust may not be so lovely, but the filling comes at last into its own.

Perhaps you see, therefore, why I think taste must come before nutrition? Our infatuation for the quasi-scientific has left us easy marks for con men and tin fiddle manufacturers.

prepackaged slices or the Supermarket swiss (which has the texture but no where near the flavor, of rubber gloves)

It's just misery to try to keep count of what God is no longer counting.

Only a daily renewed astonishment at things as they are can save us from the idols; it is our love of real processes and actual beings that keeps us sane.