Romano Guardini Quotes

and Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and grace with God and men" (Luke 2:52),

As one candle is lit from the flame of another, so is faith kindled by faith.

Truth is power, but only when one has patience and requires of it no immediate effect. And one must have no specific aims. Somehow, lack of an agenda is the greatest power. Sometimes it is better not to think in terms of plans; here months may mean nothing, and also years. Truth must be sought for its own sake, its holy, divine greatness.

The idea that everyone is strong enough to bear immediate contact with God is false, and conceivable only by an age that has forgotten what it means to stand in the direct ray of divine power, that substitutes sentimental religious 'experience' for the overwhelming reality of God's presence. To claim that everyone could and should be exposed to that reality is sacrilegious.

We are the archenemy of our own salvation, and the Shepherd must fight first of all with us - for us.

What can convince modern man is not a historical or a psychological or a continually ever modernizing Christianity but only the unrestricted and uninterrupted message of Revelation.

The Transfiguration is the summer lightning of the coming Resurrection. Also of our own resurrection, for we too are to partake

To know Christ entails accepting his will as norm. When we feel this we draw back, startled for it means the cross. The it is better to say honestly: "I can't yet," than to mouth pious phrases. Slow there with the large words "self-suffender," and "sacrifice." It is better to admit our weakness and ask him to teach us strength.

We must not oppose what is new and try to preserve a beautiful world that is inevitably perishing. Nor should we try to build a new world of the creative imagination that will show none of the damage of what is actually evolving. Rather, we must transform what is coming to be. But we can do this only if we honestly say yes to it and yet with incorruptible hearts remain aware of all that is destructive and nonhuman in it. Our age has been given to us as the soil on which to stand and the task to master.

Essentially a soldier, the Christian is always on the lookout.

That Jesus' task "is consummated" must be true, because he says so (John 19:30). Yet what a spectacle of failure! His word rejected, his message misunderstood, his commands ignored. None the less, his appointed task is accomplished, through obedience to the death - that obedience whose purity counterbalances the sins of a world. That Jesus delivered his message is what counts - not the world's reaction; and once proclaimed, that message can never be silenced, but will knock on men's hearts to the last day.

In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord says: "Therefore, if thou art offering thy gift at the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother has anything against thee, leave thy gift before the altar and go first to be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift" (Matt. 5:23-24). This means: When you go to Mass and you recall that you have been unjust to someone and that he bears you a grudge, you cannot simply walk into church as though nothing were wrong. For then you would be entering only the physical room of the building, not the congregation, which would not receive you, as you would destroy it by your mere presence.

The word is a thing of mystery, so volatile that it vanishes almost on the lip, yet so powerful that it decides fates and determines the meaning of existence. A frail structure shaped by fleeting sound, it yet contains the eternal: truth. Words come from within, rising as sounds fashioned by the organs of a man's body, as expressions of his heart and spirit. He utters them, yet he does not create them, for they already existed independently of him. One word is related to another; together they form the great unity of language, that empire of truth-forms in which a man lives.

Asceticism means that a man resolves to live as a man.