Vincent McNabb

“The deductive reasons for a course of action usually follow rather than precede the course of action. Thought follows life.”

“We shall seek first to tell the truth rather than to study the subtle art of adjusting it to the circumstances of time and person.”

“Most humbly, my beloved Saviour, I bow myself before thee. I am a worm and no man. I alone deserve to suffer. I alone shrink from suffering. I was with thee in thy days of joy, singing 'Hosanna,' and I wished to make thee King. Now, in thine hour of suffering, I am far from thee.”

“Sometimes it is a great joy just to listen to someone we love talking.”

“We cannot go alone to God. We belong to His Mystical Body, the Church; by even our most secret sins, if they be grievous, we have injured the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ and must ask forgiveness of His Mystical Body, too.”

“Of a truth, there is an inward, formless, inarticulate, almost unconscious, prayer, the very breath of love, whereby the soul is knit fast to the God whom it has tracked, amidst the tangled underwood of human life, to his covert on the eternal hills.”

“Quit Babylon for love of the Babylonians.And do not seek ease or security you can obtain by using Babylon. What will it avail you to cease living in Babylon if you do not also cease living on Babylon?”

“Marriage is an indissoluble state of life wherein a man and a woman agree to give each other power over their bodies for the begetting, birth, and upbringing of offspring.”

“It is no more irrational for the mind to take the word of the Eternal Word than for the eye to use light and for the ear to welcome sound.”

“What is superfluous to your poor estate, distribute. This is distributive charity: a virtue so sacred that crimes against it are the forerunner of inevitable doom.”

“One of the essential and most valid objections against the act of faith is that it is irrational, inasmuch as it offends against the syllogistic rule that the conclusion of an argument shall contain nothing more than the premises.”

“The forms of thought, into which we throw our timid views of God, are but symbols of truths greater than our thoughts. Yet we may not set them aside as worthless, for they are the rungs on which we dwellers in the cave climb to the full view of the Truth, as he is.”

“Though many men would be content to follow Christ by taking up their cross, few would be willing to follow Him by denying their reason.”

“Certain gifts God makes to the human soul without its asking or desiring; but there are other gifts which the grown-up soul, with the use of reason, can only have by its desire.”

“We shall not hold the dangerous axiom that 'truth is the best policy,' because policy is but a means to an end; and truth is an end, not a means.”

“Hope is some extraordinary spiritual grace that God gives us to control our fears, not to oust them.”

“The Virgin Birth is possible if there is a God. An Omnipotent Being who can do all things and yet cannot do some things is hardly worth our attack or defence.”

“How different would this country be if few were engaged in making money and many in making things.”

“As the wedded pair have given each other power over their bodies, it would be a grave sin for one to refuse either altogether or for a considerable time the fulfilment of the marriage debt.”

“St. Thomas is right. The essential prayer is the prayer of petition.”