Quotes from Antonin Sertillanges

We must beware of yielding to the pressure of a spirit of cowardly conformity which proclaims itself everybody's friend in the hope that everybody will obligingly return the compliment.

His final glance saluted the Temple, His Father's house, and the rising sun.

To upset the order of nature, and even more the order of God, who, for us, is more natural than nature itself, is to destroy the harmony of forces; and violence, unbending against the rebellion of things, against the more terrible rebellion of souls, is the only refuge of him who wishes to maintain unity at all costs.

the Cross sets the world's history into the course of God's.

Israel foresees and foretells; her religious genius has a spirit that is unshackled by the bonds of time, and her Yahweh speaks close to her ear.

She [the Church] proclaims that we owe love, honour and service to God in the first place, and after God not to humanity immediately, but to our father and mother, to our families, to our countries. After these, to humanity.

Just as no particular branch of knowledge is self-sufficing so all branches together are not self-sufficing without the queen of knowledge, philosophy, nor the whole of human knowledge without the wisdom springing from the divine science itself, theology.

Judas does not love. He does not love and that is why he betrays. He does not love, and that is why, having cast aside treason because it horrifies him, he ends by detesting himself without repenting. Self-hatred is salutary only when associated with the love of God. Alone it is homicidal; it has the power to destroy everything and it has no power at all to repair.

The good is the brother of the true; it will help its brother.

What wisdom and what virtue there is in judging oneself truly and in remaining oneself! You have a part that only you can play; and your business is to play it to perfection, instead of trying to force fortune. Our lives are not interchangeable. Equally by aiming too high and by falling too low, one misses the path to the goal. Go straight ahead, in your own way, with God for guide.

We hear our legislators proclaim unceasingly their respect for the individual conscience, though it be a religious conscience, and themselves anticlericals. All the same, all their efforts tend to, dissociate us, and to reduce us to the state of amorphous dust. They can bear no organised society other than what they call a lay society no government other than their government and no social finality other than their temporal aspirations.

Friendship is an obstetric art; it draws out our richest and deepest resources; it unfolds the wings of our dreams and hidden indeterminate thoughts; it serves as a check on our judgements, tries out our new ideas, keeps up our ardor, and inflames our enthusiasm.

It is a painful thing to say to oneself: by choosing one road I am turning my back on a thousand others. Everything is interesting; everything might be useful; everything attracts and charms a noble mind; but death is before us; mind and matter make their demands; willy-nilly we must submit and rest content as to things that time and wisdom deny us, with a glance of sympathy which is another act of our homage to the truth.

We must beware of yielding to the pressure of a spirit of cowardly conformity which proclaims itself everybody's friend in the hope that everybody will obligingly return the compliment.

The reward of a work is to have produced it; the reward of effort is to have grown by it.

When silence takes possession of you; when far from the racket of the human highway the sacred fire flames up in the stillness; when peace, which is the tranquillity of order, puts order in your thoughts, feelings, and investigations, you are in the supreme disposition for learning; you can bring your materials together; you can create; you are definitely at your working point; it is not the moment to dwell on wretched trifles, to half live while time runs by, and to sell heaven for nothings.

Truth serves only its slaves.

The man who is too isolated grows timid, abstracted, a little odd: He stumbles along amid realities like a sailor who has just come off his ship; he has lost the sense of the human lot; he seems to look on you as if you were a proposition to be inserted in a syllogism, or an example to be put down in a notebook.

How puerile it would be, and what a dangerous heresy from the religious point of view, to believe that passion in its proper place is offensive to God! We are not Manicheans, that we should incline to believe that the flesh is under a curse, and that all matter springs from the Principle of Evil. Rather do we say that matter and the flesh come from God

Very often, gleams of light come in a few minutes' sleeplessness, in a second perhaps; you must fix them. To entrust them to the relaxed brain is like writing on water; there is every chance that on the morrow there will be no slightest trace left of any happening.

Inspiration is incompatible with selfish desire. Whoever wants something for himself sets truth aside. Such aims can only degrade work.

Look in the heart and write...The man who writes like that, without pride or artifice, as it were for himself, is in reality speaking for humanity. Humanity will recognize itself in him, because it is human nature that has inspired the discourse. Life recognizes life!

Genius simplifies things

If it is a book, do not leave it without being able to sum it up and to estimate its value.