St. Jerome Quotes

St. Jerome's selections present solemn, thoughtful reflections on friendship and communication, inviting anyone seeking quiet, philosophical insight.

54 quotes

1. A friend is long sought, hardly found, and with difficulty kept.

2. Love is not to be purchased, and affection has no price.

3. The friendship that can cease has never been real.

4. It is easier to mend neglect than to quicken love.

5. No athlete is crowned but in the sweat of his brow.

6. If there is but little water in the stream, it is the fault, not of the channel, but of the source.

7. It is idle to play the lyre for an ass.

8. Everything must have in it a sharp seasoning of truth.

9. While truth is always bitter, pleasantness waits upon evildoing.

10. The line, often adopted by strong men in controversy, of justifying the means by the end.

11. Do not let your deeds belie your words, lest when you speak in church someone may say to himself, 'Why do you not practice what you preach?'

12. No one cares to speak to an unwilling listener. An arrow never lodges in a stone: often it recoils upon the sender of it.

13. That clergyman soon becomes an object of contempt who being often asked out to dinner never refuses to go.

14. It is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance.

15. Even brute beasts and wandering birds do not fall into the same traps or nets twice.

16. Sometimes the character of the mistress is inferred from the dress of her maids.

17. The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.

18. The scars of others should teach us caution.

19. When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.

20. Small minds can never handle great themes.

21. Every day we are changing, every day we are dying, and yet we fancy ourselves eternal.

22. Early impressions are hard to eradicate from the mind. When once woll has been dyed purple, who can restore it to its previous whiteness?

23. The tired ox treads with a firmer step.

24. Athletes as a rule are stronger than their backers; yet the weaker presses the stronger to put forth all his efforts.

25. For they wished to fill the winepress of eloquence not with the tendrils of mere words but with the rich grape juice of good sense.

26. It is no fault of Christianity that a hypocrite falls into sin.

27. The charges we bring against others often come home to ourselves; we inveigh against faults which are as much ours as theirs; and so our eloquence ends by telling against ourselves.

28. Neither Britain, a land fertile in tyrants, nor the people of Ireland, knew Moses and the prophets.

29. Privilegia paucorum non faciunt legem.

30. Noli equi dentes inspicere donati.

31. The Roman world is in collapse but we do not bend our neck.

32. And as regards Adam and Eve we must maintain that before the fall they were virgins in Paradise: but after they sinned, and were cast out of Paradise, they were immediately married.

33. Music to me is a voice, my voice, it's my way of expressing what colours can I bring in, what emotions, what feel. What ideas can I bring out from these instruments that would make this song come alive.

34. The best advice that I can give you is this: Church-traditions- especially when they do not run counter to the faith- are to be observed in the form in which previous generations have handed them down... The traditions which have been handed down should be regarded as apostolic laws.

35. Woman is the gate of the devil, the road to iniquity, the sting of the scorpion, in a word, a dangerous species.

36. If Christ did not want to dismiss the Jews without food in the desert for fear that they would collapse on the way, it was to teach us that it is dangerous to try to get to heaven without the Bread of Heaven.

37. For it is good to cleave to God, and to put our hopes in the Lord, so that, when we have exchanged this poor life for the kingdom of heaven, we may cry aloud: 'Whom have I in heaven but thee? There is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.' Assuredly, when we have found such wealth in heaven, we may well grieve to have sought after poor passing pleasures here on earth.

38. When I could not see the light with my blind eyes, I blamed not my eyes, but the sun.

39. Instead of speaking saintly words we must act them.

40. Honest speech does not seek secret places.

41. If you call [the synagogue] a brothel, a den of vice, the devil's refuge, Satan's fortress, a place to deprave the soul, an abyss of every conceivable disaster or whatever else you will, you are still saying less than it deserves.

42. The best advice that I can give you is this. Church-traditions — especially when they do not run counter to the faith — are to be observed in the form in which previous generations have handed them down; and the use of one church is not to be annulled because it is contrary to that of another.

43. Beauty when unadorned is adorned the most.

44. Good, better, best. Never let it rest. 'Til your good is better and your better is best.

45. It is our part to seek, His to grant what we ask; ours to make a beginning, His to bring it to completion; ours to offer what we can, His to finish what we cannot.

46. A false interpretation of Scripture causes that the gospel of the Lord becomes the gospel of man, or, which is worse, of the devil.

47. Whosoever you are who introduce new doctrines, I beseech you to spare the ears of Romans! Spare that faith which was commended by the voice of an Apostle. Why should you attempt to teach us, at the end of hundreds of years, that which we never heard before? Why bring forward what Peter and Paul did not will to make known? Until this day, the world was Christian without your doctrine. Thus, I hold as an old man onto that faith wherein I was regenerated as a boy.

48. No one loves to tell of scandal except to him who loves to hear it. Learn, then, to rebuke and check the detracting tongue by showing that you do not listen to it with pleasure.

49. Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield.

50. The fact is that my native land is a prey to barbarism, that in it men's only God is their belly, that they live only for the present, and that the richer a man is the holier he is held to be.

51. Either we must speak as we dress, or dress as we speak. Why do we profess one thing and display another? The tongue talks of chastity, but the whole body reveals impurity.

52. [O]pulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessors.

53. Small minds cannot grasp great subjects.

54. Virginity can be lost by a thought.