Morris West quotes

Morris West was an Australian novelist best known for his religious and political thrillers such as "The Shoes of the Fisherman." His works have been translated into many languages and often explore themes of faith, morality, and power. He achieved international acclaim and remains a significant figure in 20th-century literature. Here are 48 of his quotes:

If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.

Morris West

Once you accept the existence of God - however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him - then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things.

Morris West

Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!

Morris West

I once asked a distinguished biologist to explain to me the genetic imprint, the famous double helix which differentiates one being from another. He called it "the graffito of God", because it can never be erased. All other imprints - of memory, environment, experience - he called "human graffiti."

Morris West

It doesn't matter what we believe about God. It's what He knows about us.

Morris West

There are a few of us - madmen all! - who are in love with knowing, who would sell the last shirt from our backs for one small truth, one tiny star-fire to light up the murk and mystery of what we call our life... We may go blind before we see it, that's the haunting.

Morris West

In a marriage you need 'compatibility of conscience.

Morris West

That's what faith is about - living with paradox.

Morris West

One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.

Morris West

You I admire as being more, - much more - a man, and more believer too, than half the canting orthodox.

Morris West

To make that long, last donkey-ride between the pikeman and the stake, to hear the shouting and the chant of hypocrites, to be a spectacle for animals in human masks!

Morris West

We never escape our past. It is mirrored in our present. It repeats itself in our future.

Morris West

My father used to say that we surrendered our youth to purchase wisdom. What he never told me was how badly we get cheated on the exchange rate!

Morris West

Religion is the good you do in the bad times.

Morris West

You are all caught in the current of history whose headwaters rise in the dark mountains of the past. You cannot change it; you survive and help others to survive by adapting to it.

Morris West

Of all the animals in creation, politicians have the shortest memories.

Morris West

When friends do business, there is no need of contracts. Unfortunately, there are no friends in business.

Morris West

Every tribe in the world had its own version of the scapegoat, marked for exile or persecution when the homefolk needed to purge themselves of their own guilts.

Morris West

Who said to me, a foetus in the womb, a puling babe, "You have your life, but on the condition that you thus believe?" No one! Not even God! So gentlemen, I say you have no right to make terms for my life. I tell you then - No! I will not recant.

Morris West

The longer he practised his craft, the more conscious he became of the dynamic of language, of speech and writing as events in themselves. The simplest and most obvious proposition, stated in the most elementary language, could so mutate itself in the mind of the reader that it could express the opposite of what the writer had intended. What he wrote as evidence for the defence could hang the man he was defending.

Morris West

I can write no more today. The contemplation of my sorry state has reduced me to so deep a melancholy that I contemplate opening my wrist like Petronius Arbiter and lapsing quietly into oblivion. Unlike Petronius, however, I shall have neither the sound of music nor the gentle talk of friends. I still have time to choose a better moment - besides, who knows to what nightmares I might awake.

Morris West

I wonder how it will read five hundred years from now? - To make a man confess a loving God you burn him!

Morris West