Quotes from Vincent McNabb

There are no short cuts to Heaven only the ordinary way of ordinary things.

We cannot go alone to God. We belong to His Mystical Body, the Church; by even our most secret sins, if they be grievous, we have injured the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ and must ask forgiveness of His Mystical Body, too.

It is no more irrational for the mind to take the word of the Eternal Word than for the eye to use light and for the ear to welcome sound.

Dear children in Jesus Christ, prayer is absolutely necessary.

Ordinary Catholics are praying when they do not think they are. They are praying when they offer implicitly all they are doing to God.

Though many men would be content to follow Christ by taking up their cross, few would be willing to follow Him by denying their reason.

As you are not yet married, and as marriage is the fundamental state of life as well as the unity of the commonwealth, make up your mind whether you are called to this state. If you make up your mind to marry, do not marry merely a good wife: marry a good mother to your children.

The deductive reasons for a course of action usually follow rather than precede the course of action. Thought follows life.

St. Thomas is right. The essential prayer is the prayer of petition.

That mystic clasp of love lies not on the threshold but at the end of spiritual life, and can be reached for the most part only after much spiritual exercising, many denials, self-denials, watchings, and, it may be, the Cross of pain and disillusionment.

It is somewhat surprising that collections of the 'hundred best books,' which usually begin with the Bible and generally include Marcus Aurelius, should give no place to the Acts of the General Councils, though mere literary works have done little beyond filling vacant hours, and these Acts have renewed the face of the earth.

Certain gifts God makes to the human soul without its asking or desiring; but there are other gifts which the grown-up soul, with the use of reason, can only have by its desire.

Most humbly, my beloved Saviour, I bow myself before thee. I am a worm and no man. I alone deserve to suffer. I alone shrink from suffering. I was with thee in thy days of joy, singing 'Hosanna,' and I wished to make thee King. Now, in thine hour of suffering, I am far from thee.

The forms of thought, into which we throw our timid views of God, are but symbols of truths greater than our thoughts. Yet we may not set them aside as worthless, for they are the rungs on which we dwellers in the cave climb to the full view of the Truth, as he is.

What great delight it is to see the ones we love and then to have speech with them.

Beauty is the radiance of truth, and the frangrance of goodness.

No sin, especially no great sin, is just a harm done to the individual who commits it. I believe myself that the future of the human race is bound up with that idea. The soul that is conscious of a grievous sin is conscious of a great harm done to the community - to someone else. That common hurt should now be forgiven.

As the wedded pair have given each other power over their bodies, it would be a grave sin for one to refuse either altogether or for a considerable time the fulfilment of the marriage debt.

Sometimes it is a great joy just to listen to someone we love talking.

We shall not hold the dangerous axiom that 'truth is the best policy,' because policy is but a means to an end; and truth is an end, not a means.

The Virgin Birth is possible if there is a God. An Omnipotent Being who can do all things and yet cannot do some things is hardly worth our attack or defence.

Of a truth, there is an inward, formless, inarticulate, almost unconscious, prayer, the very breath of love, whereby the soul is knit fast to the God whom it has tracked, amidst the tangled underwood of human life, to his covert on the eternal hills.

Marriage is an indissoluble state of life wherein a man and a woman agree to give each other power over their bodies for the begetting, birth, and upbringing of offspring.

Our dear Lord said we should pray always. Everything we are doing should be either a prayer in itself or can be made into a prayer. Any action that is not in itself wrong can be done in union with God and His divine will.