Morris West quotes - page 2

It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment, or the courage, to pay the price.... One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to embrace the world like a lover, and yet demand no easy return of love. 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)
In Switzerland everything that is not forbidden is legal. View quote
Morris West
The prevalence of evil is the darkest and most frightening mystery of the universe. View quote
Morris West
After a death, you eat and drink and remember the good things and try to laugh again. Grief profits no one, least of all the departed, who are quit of it for ever. View quote
Morris West
You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage. View quote
Morris West
I'm a Nolan. I could dazzle you in dialect, because the words do not make the same sense to different men. View quote
Morris West
They're a migratory tribe, so you find them everywhere [...] They're hardy, longevitous, resistant to infection by disease or new ideas, little modified by regional influences. The accent drifts a bit, maybe. The dialect adapts itself to the local patois: but that's a chameleon's trick: protective colouring, no more. The rest of it, the sinuous mind, the easy passion, the leery eye, the ready smile, the fine, swaggering, billycock-and-shillelagh walk, the flexible moralities, the bel canto oratory, the black bilious angers, these never change. View quote
Morris West
[W]hen you get to Rome you have two other rules to learn: never assume that what you see is what is; never believe that what you're told is the whole truth. It's only when you've grasped that - and the Romans know you've grasped it - that you begin to win respect and make progress. View quote
Morris West
Rossini was gentle with her. "In one way or another, we all have to cope with the essential solitude of being human, whether we're celibate or married." "If you're a good person, doesn't God fill your loneliness?" "He fills it, I think, with a divine discontent." View quote
Morris West
I look out this window and think this is a cosmos, this is a huge creation, this is one small corner of it. The trees and the birds and everything else and I am part of it. I didn't ask to be put here. I've been lucky finding myself here. View quote
Morris West
I wonder how it will read five hundred years from now? (Morris West)
There are a few of us - madmen all! View quote
Morris West
O Mother of Christ, who saw what men could do to one who heard an alien music! View quote
Morris West
I say you have no right to make terms for my life. I tell you then - No! I will not recant. View quote
Morris West
No man - prince, peasant, pope, - has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. View quote
Morris West
And I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people. View quote
Morris West
The fact is that the learning process goes on, and so long as the voices are not stilled and the singers go on singing some of it gets through. View quote
Morris West
All institutions are prone to corruption and to the vices of their members. View quote
Morris West
Well I travelled quite a lot in the east, and one of the things that impressed me greatly was the buddhist notion of the continuity of things, the wheel of life which is what we're talking about, the ever turning wheel. View quote
Morris West
You know one of the causes of modern despair is the fact that we have had proposed to us, from various quarters, an impossible perfection. View quote
Morris West
None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature. (Morris West)
No man - prince, peasant, pope, - has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy!" View quote
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. You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage. View quote
Morris West

Morris West

Occupation: Australian Writer
Born: April 26, 1916
Died: October 9, 1999
Quotes count: 48
Wikipedia: Morris West

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