Be always displeased with what you are if you wish to be what you are not. Always add, always walk, always proceed. Neither stand still nor go back nor deviate.
The Head and the body are Christ wholly and entirely. The Head is the only begotten Son of God, the body is His Church; the bridegroom and the bride, two in one flesh. All who dissent from the Scriptures concerning Christ, although they may be found in all places in which the Church is found, are not in the Church; and again all those who agree with the Scriptures concerning the Head, and do not communicate in the unity of the Church, are not in the Church.
For if God is man's chief good, which you cannot deny, it clearly follows, since to seek the chief good is to live well, that to live well is nothing else but to love God with all the heart, with all the soul, with all the mind.
And yet I do love a kind of light, melody, fragrance, food, embracement when I love my God; for He is the light, the melody, the fragrance, the food, the embracement of my inner self - there where is a brillance that space cannot contain, a sound that time cannot carry away, a perfume that no breeze disperses, a taste undimisnished by eating, a clinging together that no saiety will sunder. This is what I love when I love my God.
For if it is not lawful to take the law into our own hands and slay even a guilty person, whose death no public sentence has warranted. Then certainly he who kills himself is a homicide, and so much the guiltier of his own death as he was more innocent of that offence for which he doomed himself to die.
There is a joy which is not given to the ungodly, but to those who love Thee for Thine own sake, whose joy Thou Thyself art. And this is the happy life, to rejoice to Thee, of Thee, for Thee; this it is, and there is no other.
Cyprian was not issuing a new decree but was keeping to the most solid belief of the Church in order to correct some who thought that infants ought not be baptized before the eighth day after their birth. . . . He agreed with certain of his fellow bishops that a child is able to be duly baptized as soon as he is born.
You have been professing yourself reluctant to throw off your load of illusion because truth was uncertain. Well, it is certain now, yet the burden still weighs you down, while other people are given wings on freer shoulders, people who have not worn themselves out with research, nor spent a decade and more reflecting on these questions.
What you see is the bread and the chalice; that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith obliges you to accept is that the bread is the body of Christ and the chalice is the blood of Christ. This has been said very briefly, which may perhaps be sufficient for faith; yet faith does not desire instruction
When the king asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied:
The same as you do when you infest the whole world;
but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber,
and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.
Bad company is like a nail driven into a post, which, after the first and second blow, may be drawn out with little difficulty; but being once driven up to the head, the pincers cannot take hold to draw it out, but which can only be done by the destruction of the wood.