Quotes About Saintliness

Saintliness is very odd. When people encounter it, they often take it for something else, something completely unlike it: indifference, mockery, scheming, coldness, insolence, perhaps even contempt. But they're mistaken, and that makes them furious. They commit an awful crime. This is doubtless the reason why most saints end up as martyrs.

St. Thomas is really a great man quite apart from his saintliness.

Artists put as much vitality and delight into their saintliness and escape out as most men do their escapes into similar places from respectable existence.

Saintliness is also a temptation.

I call saintliness not a state but the moral procedure leading to it.

Saintliness means turning pain to good account. It means forcing the devil to be God.

The rude and simple brother must not suppose himself a saint just because he knows nothing; and he who is educated and eloquent must not measure his saintliness merely by his fluency.

In Dostoevsky there were things unbelievable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in turgenev

What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.

It's very shocking, I think, for people caring for the dying to realise how unsaintly they feel, how much anger is mixed up with their grief. In fact, often I think the anger that they feel is a form of grief; it's a kind of raging against what's happening.

Even the notion of 'miracle' is Western and modern; it is connected to the scientific conception of the world, with which it is nevertheless incompatible. What we regard as miracles, the Hindus see as natural effects of exceptional powers that are found in a few people, and more often in the saints. They thus constitute a presumption of saintliness.

Saintliness is a special kind of madness. While the madness of mortals exhausts itself in useless and fantastic actions, holy madness is a conscious effort towards winning everything.

Paganism is the deepening of appearances, while saintliness is the sickness of depths.

You will be at your best forever, Even now you have good moments. Occasional glimpses of your heavenly self. When you change your baby's diaper, forgive your boss's temper, tolerate your spouse's moodiness, you display traces of saintliness.

La perfection, la sainteté recherchée par les taoïstes, c'est l'union mystique avec le tao éternel: c'est 's'effacer vivant dans cette présence originelle et souveraine qui enveloppe tout sans être jamais enveloppé', dans le 'sans forme qui engendre toutes les formes, dans le tao qui possède une vie éternelle'. Et c'est atteindre, du même coup, l'immortalité.

Bulgakov's gentle irony is a warning against the mistake, more common in our time than we might think, of equating artistic mastery with a sort of saintliness, or, in Kierkegaard's terms, of confusing the aesthetic with the ethical.

When Pakistan reciprocated Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's peacenik bus trip to Lahore with a military invasion of the Kargil district of Jammu and Kashmir in 1999, the Indian Army was not allowed to cross the Line of Control and strike at the invaders' bases and supply lines in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. This raised the death toll among Indian soldiers, the typical Gandhian price for a pose of saintliness

What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.

Mother Teresa, when asked about her holiness or saintliness, always answers in a matter-of-fact way that holiness is a necessity of life--and explains that it is not the luxury of a few, such as those who take the course of religious life, but is "a simple duty of all. Holiness is for everyone.

She was afraid he would turn into one of those men who make a saintliness of their resentment, shining through the years with a pure and tortured light.

But one can acquire a taste for love as for loneliness or ugliness as for saintliness. Each a special way of going down.