Quotes about holiness

The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is Saintliness. The saintly character is the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the same in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced.

“We don’t go to Fort Chicago,” said Ta-Kumsaw. “We go to the holy place.”

“A church?” asked Alvin.

Ta-Kumsaw laughed. “You White people, when you make a place holy you build walls so nothing of the land can get in. Your god is nothing and nowhere, so you build a church with nothing alive inside, a church that could be anywhere, it doesn’t matter—nothing and nowhere.”

“Well what does make a place holy?” asked Alvin.

“Because that’s where the Red man talks to the land, and the land answers.”

It was not delight, not wonder that arose among us, it was the peace of heaven.

A thousand times have I said it to her and to myself: the most beautiful is also the most sacred. And such was everything in her. Like her singing, even so was her life.

“’Sacred! As with all things sacred, it gives with one hand and takes with the other.’”

I feel safer with a Pyrrho than with a St. Paul, for a jesting wisdom is gentler than an unbridled sanctity.

Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make either heroes or saints.