It is our care for the helpless, our practice of loving kindness, that brands us in the eyes of those who oppose us.

If we refuse our homage to statues and frigid images, the very counterpart of their dead originals, with which hawks, and mice, and spiders are so well acquainted, does it not merit praise instead of penalty [Christians were punished for not worshiping Roman gods] that we have rejected what we have come to see is error? We cannot surely be made out to injure those whom we are certain are nonentities. What does not exist is in its nonexistence secure from suffering.

Arguments about Scripture achieve nothing but a stomachache and a headache.

I revere the fullness of His Scripture, in which He manifests to me both the Creator and creation. In the gospel moreover, I discover a Minister and Witness of the Creator, even His Word.

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.

What is nobler than to tread under foot the gods of the nations, to exorcise evil spirits, to perform cures, to seek divine revelations, and to live to God? These are the pleasures - these are the spectacles - that befit Christian men.

It is certainly no part of religion to compel religion.