Quotes from St. Jerome

When you believe you are excusing yourself, you are accusing yourself.

What Saint has ever won his crown without first contending for it?

How can the sun and the moon praise God as the prophet exhorts them to do? By perfectly carrying out the role God has given them. Thus they render Him great praise. Behold, therefore, a wonderful means by which you can praise God all day: do your duty and whatever else you are given to do well.

But when the bright light of all the world was put out, or, rather, when the Roman Empire was decapitated, and, to speak more correctly, the whole world perished in one city

While truth is always bitter, pleasantness waits upon evildoing.

You censure this with difficulty because you have allowed it to become customary.

What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way.

Marriage fills the Earth, virginity Heaven.

Strictly speaking, one should not even rightly compare virginity to marriage because you cannot make a comparison between two things if one is good and the other evil.

A false interpretation of Scripture causes that the gospel of the Lord becomes the gospel of man, or, which is worse, of the devil.

The fact is that my native land is a prey to barbarism, that in it men's only God is their belly, that they live only for the present, and that the richer a man is the holier he is held to be.

Avoid, as you would the plague, a clergyman who is also a man of business.

The line, often adopted by strong men in controversy, of justifying the means by the end.

For all riches come from iniquity, and unless one were to lose another could not gain. Hence the common adage seems to me to be very true: The rich man is unjust or the heir of an unjust one.

A man who is well grounded in the testimonies of the Scripture is the bulwark of the Church.

The most base of men can be civilized through suffering.

Among us, what is not allowed to women is equally not allowed to men.

Keep doing some kind of work, that the devil may always find you employed.

It is not enough for us to restrain from doing evil, unless we shall also do good.

Nothing is hard for lovers, no labor is difficult for those who wish it.

Virginity can be lost by a thought.

Someone may ask, 'How is justice greater than all the other virtues?' The other virtues gratify the one who possesses them; justice does not give pleasure to the one possessing it, but instead pleases others.

So valuable to heaven is the dignity of the human soul that every member of the human race has a guardian angel from the moment the person begins to be.

For the preservation of chastity, an empty and rumbling stomach and fevered lungs are indispensable.