Quotes About Sainthood

The saint is first and foremost a being without formal context; the idea of fashion is antipathetic to the idea of sainthood.

Our spiritual journey is—or ought to be—a deepening realization of the possibility of sainthood in all of us.

His head was boiled, impaled upon a pole and raised above London Bridge. So ended the life of Thomas More, one of the few Londoners upon whom sainthood has been conferred and the first English layman to be beatified as a martyr.

I have always wanted to become a saint. Unfortunately, when I have compared myself with the saints, I have always found that there is the same difference between the saints and me as there is between a mountain whose summit is lost in the clouds and a humble grain of sand trodden underfoot by passers-by.

But personally, I think [sainthood] is not so much the growth of virtue, as simply the replacement of prior vices with an addiction to one's god.

The success of sainthood is the success attained by struggle and suffering and achieved by faith; a success of honor, of clean hands and pure heart, of service to man and glory to God.

When the history of the 20th century is written, there are going to be some pretty obscure people who are entitled to sainthood. And they're not going to be well-known.

I gathered poets around me and we all wrote beautiful erotica. As we were condemned to focus only on sensuality, we had violent explosions of poetry. Writing erotica became a road to sainthood rather than to debauchery.

Sainthood does not mean sinlessness.

How can she walk through the streets, so vulnerable, so unknowing, and not have people and dogs and perpetual calamity following her? But overhung with her vines of faith, she is protected from their gaze like the pools in Epping Forest. I see she can walk across the leering world and suffer injury only from the ones she loves. But I love her and her silence is propaganda for sainthood.

Laughter's the nearest we ever get, or should get, to sainthood. It's the state of grace that saves most of us from contempt.

When men and women are rewarded for greed, greed becomes a corrupting motivator. When we equate the gluttonous consumption of the earth's resources with a status approaching sainthood, when we teach our children to emulate people who live unbalanced lives, and when we define huge sections of the population as subservient to an elite minority, we ask for trouble. And we get it.

Ideas, doctrines - mere façades, decorative fantasies, accidents. If you have not resolved to kill yourself, there is no difference between you and the others, you belong to the faction of the living, all - no matter what their convictions - great believers. Do you deign to breathe? You are approaching sainthood, you deserve canonization.

I have moments of darkness, of anger, and moments of rage. They do creep up at the most inopportune times. Not to recognize that in my music would give people a sense of sainthood that I don't necessarily have or even want to have.

No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid; but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

I cannot imagine any other country in the world where the opposition would seek, and the chief executive would allow, the dissemination of his most private and personal conversations with his staff, which, to be honest, do not exactly confer sainthood on anyone concerned.

It is just as little necessary for the saint to be a philosopher as for the philosopher to be a saint; just as it is not necessary for a perfectly beautiful person to be a great sculptor, or for a sculptor to be himself a beautiful person. In general it is a strange demand on a moralist that he should commend no other virtue than that which he himself possesses.

What it comes down to, Red, is some people refuse to get their hands dirty at all. That's called sainthood, and the pigeons land on your shoulders and crap all over your shirt.

Morality binds people into groups. It gives us tribalism, it gives us genocide, war, and politics. But it also gives us heroism, altruism, and sainthood.

He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted - to be a saint.

I have played a few lay saints in my time.

If there were ever a cadaver eligible for sainthood, it would not be our Spalding Gray upon the cross, it would be these guys: the brain-dead, beating-heart organ donors that come and go in our hospitals every day.

Every writing career starts as a personal quest for sainthood, for self-betterment. Sooner or later, and as a rule quite soon, a man discovers that his pen accomplishes a lot more than his soul.

The alien girl—she called herself Dorothy—was by virtue of her survival elevated to living sainthood. The dog was merely annoying.