All Quotes

"In both Greek and Latin, up until Tertullian, the meaning given to the term “”person“” (which is the equivalent of the Greek “'prosopon”') was that of ‘mask’ or ‘face’. (introduction, p. 9)"

"High up in the wall of the abandoned building, the mute dwarf sat perched on his tall stool like a buzzard and peered down squint-eyed out the black empty window. Waves of collapsed roof and concrete swept out over the lot beneath him, as if his building had crashed down from the sky and sent a rolling swell of destruction outward on impact. Scattered crusts of snow flashed up at him, signaling like mirrors in the debris, causing flecks of color and transparent spiders to drift across his eyes as his pupils shrank against the light. Behind him in the darkness, his bed was a mountain of crusted blankets and frayed quilts he’d extracted from the trash heaps of the neighborhood and piled in a damp mound in the furthest corner of the room. The bedding was still warm from his night’s burrowing and steamed in the cold, surrounded by a flickering horseshoe of melted candles that trapped it like a dim beast in a magic circle."

"The young man was a strip of struggling flesh carried along by the crowd, surfing the heaving waves in a boiling pilgrimage of genetically enraptured insects. The insect mob emptied suddenly into the mouth of a department store and he was left swaying on the corner in the stabbing sun, attacked by the screaming reflections of passing cars and plate glass windows. He pinched his eyes up at the dry hills. They arched above the city like the gnarled backs of drugged lions, stretching up into a heaven that was itself descending in thick sheets of sulfuric mist. The sunlight filtered through this levitating powder and felt more pernicious for it, as if the sun’s rays were transformed by chemical reaction into malevolent xrays, nutriment-seeking carcinogens that penetrated the open pores of unprotected skin and would eat any living thing from the inside-out."

"Everything merges eventually — everything is organic. It’s impossible to distinguish one thing from another thing. When your mind is emptied of selfishness, it crumbles and dissolves in the water. If I cut at my body and concentrate correctly, I won't feel it. Eachtime my heart beats, it jerks violently and whips my spine loose, tugging at the base of my brain. Memories move through the clotted and rotting forest inside my head and crush the present beneath them. My memories don’t belong to me. They’re as unknowable as a centipede fluttering its legs in the dark corner beneath the sink. When an image moves through my nervous system, it’s with the predatory greed of an intruder. My body’s laid open, transparent, defenseless. Each second of time is an individual insect feeding on my blood."

"The older boy lay curled on his side, baking in the sun like a discarded and emaciated fetus left for dead in the rocks by its wandering, mutant giant mother, as she’d scavenged among the washed up trash of the ruined city. His eyes rolled sightlessly in his head as sand flies worked at the gummed saliva in the corners of his lips. His fingers were bunched in against his chest and twitched as if typing out a frenetic description of his dementia."

"I’ve got muscles, sol want to use them. I get up in the morning, pose naked in front of the mirror, and flex for half an hour. Looking at myself, I want to beat someone’s head in with my bare fist. I want to see my fist forced down some asshole’s face, reach down, grab a handful of intestines, and pull them up and out the throat. That would make me feel good. Whatever makes me feel good is what counts. The reason I build my muscles is to use them. That makes me feel good. It'd be senseless to work out for years just for the stupid satisfaction of feeling “healthy” or knowing I look good when I’m about to fuck somebody up the ass. I get satisfaction out of grinding a face in the pavement. I don’t want to question it. I like causing pain. That’s how Iam. I see an immediate response to something I just did. No bullshit. Pure animal pain, me the victor, me in control, me on top, you on the bottom."

"A shadow figure on the wall is cutting off the head of a little boy. The huge and looming murderer is holding up the head like a Viking showing off a war trophy. He’s swinging the head above him by the hair. Shadow-blood flies through the air in a black swirl. A handful of the boy’s brains land in my face like warm cottage cheese. There’s a fisheye close-up of a terrified eye in the TV screen. An oiled young stud does situps on his Soloflex machine, eviscerates himself with an impossibly honed and gleaming kitchen knife, flings his dangling intestines over his shoulder like a sashaying transvestite in a mink stole and walks straight into a day school room full of naked shit-smeared children, who devour him in a bloody tornado of razor-sharp teeth. They’re led away yapping and screeching like a pack of dogs on a multiple leash by their teacher, who wears a neon yellow leotard, purple high-heeled shoes, and has the slicked hard flesh of someone who obviously works out six hours a day herself..."

"My bed sits in the center of the room, a steaming sarcophagus in a dim pagan tomb. The television is on a platform at my feet, washing my swaddled and bloated living corpse with ethereal blue light. Looking to the left, the wall is covered with the desiccated shell-bodies of cockroaches. Each time I catch one (and there are thousands, millions living in the walls, under the floor, in the ceiling — I hear them shifting like the waves in the sea in my sleep), I dry it slowly at low temperature in the oven, then I pin it to the wall. The wall glistens in the flickering light with the sheen of their armor. I’ve pinned them in spiraling primitive shapes that map out the cosmos, landscapes, stars, jagged lightning bolts, skulls, knives, fat hermaphroditic fertility symbols. The designs are difficult to discern, due to the fact that everything is the same brown-on-brown color scheme, but they’re there, if you look closely. I watch the wall for hours each day, like a mandala. The dancing shadows of the television give the detailed beadwork of the wall a sense of grandiosity. I pretend I’m in a cave beneath a jungle burial ground examining, awestruck, an ancient African mural I’ve discovered, cool and perfectly preserved beneath the malarial humidity."

"When I sleep, my dreams mingle with scenes generated from the screen, like sewage discharged into the black sea inside my room. Last night, for instance, in order to revenge the perceived indifference of my lover — a self-composed, confident, and buxom lawyer, as seen on a weekly “gritty and realistic” cop show — I stalked her as she walked a path through the chaparral in the hills of Topanga Canyon dressed in high heels and a power suit, searching for a used condom as evidence in a divorce case turned violent, her architecturally massive hair flowing in the dry baked breeze like the flag of an elite nation of gods."

"I’m laughing my guts out as we fuck. You’re trying to flatter me, telling me how wonderful I am (only because you’ re raping me), and I’m dreaming of stabbing you through the ear with my knife. I’m devoted to the idea of your belittlement. It’s what I live for, what I think about every second. While I’m at work, where I’m treated like a dog, only my body is present. My mind is standing on top of a monolith, looking down on a swelling crowd of cowardly men. It’s my position in life (I’ve always known it) to cut the throats of arrogant men, and weak, humble men also (maybe they deserve oblivion even more). I’m breathing a red fog. It goes down into my lungs and fills me with my real strength: my lust. It’s my secret consciousness, my right to kill, as well as my duty. I love to hold your hand, feeling its buried strength, caressing it into impotence. You feel it too. You feel your power draining into me. You're helpless. There’s nothing you can do about it. I’m a magnet that draws every particle of life out of your body. All you live for is orgasm, for the last drop of life to be sucked out. I’ll never understand how you can be so stupid as to strive for your own denigration. But it isn’t my place to understand you."

"A man of keen intellectual vision and an unlimited capacity for work, Stattler was ever ready to guard and defend Catholic principles."

"My work has been a pleasant one, and I have striven to keep but one thing in view, and that is to do as much good as possible."

"Adrienne had a very high spirituality with many mystical manifestations (including stigmata). By conversing assiduously with her and noting down her confidences, B. slowly developed his own theological vision."

"My latest book is entitled La Trinità: Mistero d'Amore (The Trinity: Mystery of Love) and has been reprinted for a second edition. Of all the books I have written (more than a hundred), this is the most beautiful and the most original. I also consider it my ‘masterpiece’. The mystery of the Trinity is a mystery of Love, which is realised and expressed in the Three Divine Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is the basic idea of the book, the idea that inspired me: total Love; Love, in the strongest sense of the term, is truly everything!"

"While man is clearly a finite being, in self-transcendence he reveals himself to be “'capax infiniti”'. Self-transcendence “together with culture and freedom, is the third characteristic trait that clearly separates man from animals: man constantly surpasses himself ... in everything he does, thinks, says, knows, loves and achieves."

"[Natural law] does not come from outside (and therefore is not heteronomous) but from within (and in this sense is autonomous: it is the law that reason itself gives to man or, better still, it is the law that man himself gives himself through his own reason): it is not the result of arduous and abstruse speculation and its perception is so easy that it appears almost intuitive. :*Quoted in Giuseppe Brienza, “”Who was Battista Mondin, missionary and theologian“”, “'Formiche.net”', 4 February 2015."

"Negative theology and positive theology are almost like the wheels of a bicycle. Just as a bicycle cannot move forward if the two wheels do not turn together, so there can be no valid theology if the negative and positive approaches are not used together. The positive path alone leads to anthropomorphism, idolatry, and blasphemy. The negative path leads to agnosticism and atheism."

"Only with God and in God can man hope to fulfil himself. The study and knowledge of God are the burning embers that (together with worship and prayer) fuel the flame of our hope."

"Parmenides reaches the highest peak: it is the peak of being, the culmination of metaphysics. Parmenides is the first to conquer this marvellous peak, which, after him, all the other great metaphysicians will also attempt to reach. Parmenides is aware of the greatness of his achievement. [...] Parmenides reached this highest peak not through the senses but through reason. (p. 70)"

"Socrates is not a metaphysician in the traditional sense [...] and yet the epithet “metaphysician” rightfully belongs to him, because his study of man goes far beyond the field of science and penetrates the deepest roots of human being and action. (p. 120)"

"Plato is the supreme philosopher, the philosopher par excellence. Undoubtedly, the figure of Aristotle also shines with brilliant splendour. But [...] no other philosopher has influenced the destiny of Western philosophy as much as Plato. His epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, political and aesthetic doctrines, assimilated by Christianity, have become a permanent legacy of medieval and modern culture. The figure of Plato is fundamental, gigantic and multifaceted. In addition to the history of philosophy, it also affects the history of poetry, literature and the Greek language. […] Plato's extraordinary greatness has been recognised throughout the ages. (p. 139)"

"The long and patient exploration of the spiritual world led classical Metaphysics, in its final phase, to the discovery of God: the one God (the One, the Good) of Plotinus, Porphyry and Proclus. (introduction, p. 5)"

"There is a faith that is enriched by the concepts of reason, and there is a reason that is enriched by the gifts of faith. (introduction, p. 6)"

"Christianity is a religion and not a philosophy: an act of salvation (a Heilsgeschichte) and not philosophical speculation. Its goal is not, like philosophy, to provide an exhaustive explanation of reality, but to establish a relationship of communion between man and God. (introduction, p. 7)"

"Christianity reveals many mysteries that are completely inaccessible to reason. Such are the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation, sanctifying grace, the Mystical Body, and the resurrection of the flesh. (introduction, p. 7)"

"It is in Christianity that the spirit becomes self-transparent consciousness, a reality ‘in and of itself’ (to use the language of Hegel), free initiative and absolute freedom. (introduction, p. 9)"

"Only thanks to the concept of persona – a being endowed with dignity and absolute value – brought by Christianity, which makes all men images of God created directly by Him, do all forms of discrimination based on sex, age, race, language, power, wealth, religion, etc. All men are equally worthy of esteem, respect and love, even their enemies, especially the weakest, the poorest, the most humble and defenceless. (introduction, p. 10)"

"It is from the new truths contained in the great philosophical potential of Christianity that Christian metaphysics derives its main characteristics. It will always be a “'creationist”', “'personalistic”', “'spiritualistic”' and “'agapic”' metaphysics. (introduction, p. 15)"

"The cradle of Christian metaphysics was Alexandria, Egypt. When Christianity was born, this city was the most important cultural centre of the Roman Empire, having taken the place that had previously been held by Athens. (p. 21)"

"At the school of Philo, Christian doctors from Alexandria learned to do philosophy and to develop Christian metaphysics, creating a synthesis between Greek philosophy and the philosophical potential of Christianity. (p. 22)"

"The main merit of the school of Alexandria is that it created theological science, granting Christian citizenship to philosophy and building a solid Christian metaphysics. (p. 23)"

"The God of Clement's Christian metaphysics is endowed with intelligence, will, freedom, power and goodness. (p. 32)"

"Origen embraces the key principle of Christian metaphysics, the theorem of creation. With Clement, he affirms that everything that is not God was drawn from nothing. He is the only principle of all things. (p. 55)"

"Great metaphysical creations always coincide with the golden age of a civilisation. Whereas the disappearance of Metaphysics is one of the most eloquent signs of a civilisation's decline. (prologue, p. 7)"

"The transition from one era to another is never instantaneous. Epochs are historical periods spanning several centuries, and cultural transitions last a few centuries. (p. 9)"

"There are two salient features of Renaissance culture that influence Metaphysics speculation: spiritual unrest and the secularisation of culture. (p. 10)"

"Humanism remains a deeply religious and essentially Christian culture. However, the shift in the cultural epicentre – from God to man – generates a new spirituality marked by tensions and anxieties unknown in the previous era. (p. 10)"

"Another peculiarity of humanistic culture is its partial “'secularisation”', which occurs on three levels: in places, in people and in disciplines. (p. 11)"

"The substance of Nicholas of Cusa“s thought is above all Christian and Platonic. And the term 'substance” is used here in its proper and rigorous sense. In fact, in Cusano's system, Platonism constitutes a substantial element and not simply a formal and expressive one. (p. 18)"

"As much as possible, let us encourage women to stay in the country. Filipino men should strive to be productive so that their wives would not be forced to work abroad."

"The 13th-month pay is a core labor standard and the Department of Labor and Employment will not compromise on its payment by the employers to their workers."

"And even if some may have already recovered after the floodwaters have receded, they may still find it difficult to return to work if their companies or employers’ businesses have also been hit by floods."

"Ἀρχόμενος γαῖάν τε καὶ εὐρέα πόντον ἀείδειν καὶ ποταμοὺς πόλιάς τε καὶ ἀνδρῶν ἄκριτα φῦλα, μνήσομαι Ὠκεανοῖο βαθυρρόου· ἐν γὰρ ἐκείνῳ πᾶσα χθὼν, ἅτε νῆσος ἀπείριτος, ἐστεφάνωται, οὐ μὲν πᾶσα διαπρὸ περίδρομος, ἀλλὰ διαμφὶς ὀξυτέρη βεβαυῖα πρὸς ἠελίοιο κελεύθους, σφενδόνῃ εἰοικυῖα· μίαν δέ ἑ καίπερ ἐοῦσαν ἄνθρωποι τρισσῇσιν ἐπ’ ἠπείροισι δάσαντο· πρώτην μέν Λιβύην, μετὰ δʼ Εὐρώπην Ἀσίην τε."

"To th’ east a lovely country wide extends, , whose borders the wide ocean bounds; On this the sun, new rising from the main, Smiles pleas’d, and sheds his early orient beam. Th’ inhabitants are swart, and in their locks Betray the tints of the dark hyacinth. Various their functions; some the rock explore, And from the mine extract the latent gold; Some labour at the woof with cunning skill, And manufacture linen; others shape And polish iv’ry with the nicest care: Many retire to rivers shoal, and plunge To seek the beryl flaming in its bed, Or glittering diamond. Oft the jasper’s found Green, but diaphanous; the topaz too Of ray serene and pleading; last of all The lovely amethyst, in which combine All the mild shades of purple. The rich soil, Wash’d by a thousand rivers, from all sides Pours on the natives wealth without control."

"I want to take care of the teacher so that the teacher in turn will take care of our children, so in turn our children will take care of the future of the country."

"Philosophy is an inventory of thoughts in the flow of life."

"Poor Nietzsche! He was the only philosopher who had the singular privilege of being held responsible for nothing less than a world war."

"After history has taught us that possession of the Truth often produces fanaticism, and that an individual armed with truth is a potential terrorist, one is led to ask: are relativism and nihilism really the radical evil that we are led to believe? Or do they not also produce an awareness of the relativity of every point of view, and therefore of every religion? And so, do they not convey respect for the point of view of others and, therefore, the fundamental value of tolerance? There is beauty even in relativism and nihilism: they inhibit fanaticism."

"His [Nietzsche's] criticism of the “herd” mentality and morality, his defence of what we might call a “right to excellence”, is an attempt to overcome the sterility of simple prohibition, self-denial and renunciation, which mortify life. Nietzsche wants life to be realised in all its potential. He therefore recommends a “creative” attitude that gives life its fullness, similar to that of the artist who imprints a beautiful form on his work. In this sense, his new morality is a kind of “aesthetics of existence” whose imperative recommends: “Become what you are!” And even if life is not beautiful, it is up to us to try to make it so."

"One of the problems of the current Church is that the production of happiness has slipped out of its hands. But it is not Nietzsche's fault that the power of the Gospels is fading and the condition of Western man is becoming increasingly paganised."