— Pope John Paul II, “Discourse to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences”, 26 Sep 1986  <link>

— St. Anthony of Padua  <link>

— St. Augustine  <link>

— Henri Nouwen  <link>

It is part of the legacy of Western thought your teachers cheated you from learning in school when they were busy teaching you about recycling, or some other popular fad.

— John C. Wright  <link>

— Bennett Cerf  <link>

Against the backdrop of context-dependent phenomena such as this, it is hardly possible to contend that we consist, from the bottom up, of machine-like devices. The idea reflects a dogma crystallized from a rarefied mesh of abstractions rather than an engagement with actual organisms. You might just as well find “machines” in the currents of a river. When scientists write that “Clock genes are components of the circadian clock comparable to the cogwheels of a mechanical watch,” it ought to be scandalous. Yet such machine language is universal, is heavily relied on by otherwise rigorous scientists in their attempts to explain the organism, has no evident, serviceable meaning, and working biologists rarely if ever make a serious attempt to justify or even define it.

Nor are the points at issue even particularly subtle. Here is the heart of the matter: The parts of a clock are put together in a certain way; the parts of an organism grow within an integral unity from the very start. They do not add themselves together to form a whole, but rather progressively differentiate themselves out of the prior wholeness of seed or germ. They are growing even as they begin functioning, and their functioning is a contribution toward their growing. The parts never were and never are completely separate, never are assembled. A specific bit of food taken in from outside never becomes some new, recognizable part, added to the rest; rather, it is metabolically transformed and assimilated by the ruling unity that is already there. The structures performing this work, such as they are, are themselves being formed out of the work. Does any of this sound remotely like a machine?

— Steve Talbott, “The Unbearable Wholeness of Being”  <link>

— Marcus Aurelius  <link>

— Yogi Berra  <link>

The fact is that most putts don’t drop, most beef is tough, most children grow up to be just people, most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration, and most jobs are more often dull than otherwise…

Life is like an old-time rail journey—delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.

— Jenkins Lloyd Jones  <link>

If anyone wants to have the Church changed, he must make himself the starting-point of renewal. For the critic himself is part of what the Church is suffering from. For usually his own life is not much of a recommendation for Christianity.

— Karl Rahner, SJ, Theology for Renewal:  Bishops, Priests, Laity  <link>

The church is always God hung between two thieves. Thus no one should be surprised or shocked at how badly the church has betrayed the gospel and how much it continues to do so today. It has never done very well. Conversely, however, nobody should deny the good the church has done either. It has carried grace, produced saints, morally challenged the planet, and made, however imperfectly, a house for God to dwell in on this earth.

To be connected with the church is to be associated with scoundrels, warmongers, fakes, child-molesters, murderers, adulterers and hypocrites of every description. It also, at the same time, identifies you with saints and the finest persons of heroic soul within every time, country, race and gender. To be a member of the church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of soul….because the church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves.

— Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing  <link>