I find my data first in myself, not first in the poets. For if I did not find it in myself, I would not be able to find it in the poets.

It is reasonable to love the Absolute absolutely for the same reason it is reasonable to love the relative relatively.

In every sin, we choose to believe the devil's lie rather than God's truth.

Our soul, like Mary's body, is to receive God Himself if only we, like her, believe, consent and receive; if only we speak her truly magic word fiat, "let it be." It is the creative word, the word God used to create the universe.

No emotion, merely as an emotion, is a sin, because we cannot directly control the arising of an emotion in our soul.

God created the possibility of evil; people actualized that potentiality. The source of evil is not God's power but mankind's freedom. Even an all-powerful God could not have created a world in which people had genuine freedom and yet there was no potentiality for sin, because our freedom includes the possibility of sin within its own meaning.

For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline, and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.