Michael D. O'Brien Quotes & Sayings

For those who suffer disposal, the cost is their very lives. For those of us who survive, there is a creeping indifference to anything other than one's own survival, which results in increased selfishness, hardness of heart, denial - which in the long range will bring about the devaluation of self. To counter this devaluation, therefore, one flees into pride of accomplishment. Isn't what we do the defining measure of selfhood in our society? — Michael D. O'Brien

eight, nine kilometers - more than halfway! — Michael D. O'Brien

The human mind is stimulated by change, motivated by meeting the challenge of novelty or threat or pleasure, rewarded with the sensations of being instrumental in altering environments, and will persevere in this as long as there is some degree of perceivable progress. People turn to knitting baby booties, doing crossword puzzles, collecting rare coins; they may even make an effort to understand E=mc2 or to study the genetic adaptations of cacti, but in all cases, they need to see some fruit of their labors. — Michael D. O'Brien

My mind is reeling. — Michael D. O'Brien

The world is full of hatred because it refuses to be poor. It wants to conquer fear with power. But you will conquer in another way, the unknown way. First, perhaps, you will forget. You will not see. You will not understand. Later you may see, and then you will know that the false self must die in order for the true self to be born. — Michael D. O'Brien

Assisi was like something, but like what? Like something one had always known, but never seen. Something perceived from afar, like a wind from the promised land that greeted the stranger and sojourner coming up out of bondage from Egypt. It was joy, no doubt about that. But a joy unlike any other joy he had ever experienced. Unexpected joy in a dark time. Curious joy. There was no other word that approximated it. A taste of sweetness like the fecundity of grape arbors in the terraces below, — Michael D. O'Brien

Children need to see that they are part of a history and that the story of their family is a living thing. God tells it, a new story in each generation, and each must hold hands across the sea of time, joining together the ones who went before and the ones who come after. It is given from above. Little do we understand this in the beginning, but time teaches us many things we did not expect to learn. That is life. It is the same everywhere. — Michael D. O'Brien

Solitude is the natural dwelling place of truth ... It is there you will wrestle. It is there you will be tested by fire and by darkness. — Michael D. O'Brien

We came to know that love is the soul of the world, though its body bleeds, and we must learn to bleed with it. — Michael D. O'Brien

Theophilos, the light of reason that we both reverence is not a god. Neither does the highest development of the human mind confer divinity upon us. We may quote Aristotle one moment and in the next find ourselves betraying our wives and children - for the sake of passion, in the name of love - and not know how we arrived at that lamentable state. Reason is a gift of God but of itself cannot ennoble a man. — Michael D. O'Brien

I suspect that I shall be broken; I suspect that I shall finally live. Save me, Emily! Save me from this shattering we are pleased at times to call love. — Michael D. O'Brien

The pain in itself is not joy. It is simply pain. But the meaning of the pain, that is joy. — Michael D. O'Brien

[About the main character approaching death in old age, observed by her husband ... ] He saw that she had already laid down a large portion of her life long ago. Piece by piece she had given it away as she wrestled with existence, as her self was absorbed as nourishment into his life and the life of the children and the community. And laid down most piercingly, as she abandoned, one by one, the shapes of the dreams she had planned. Only to take them up again in other forms. — Michael D. O'Brien

[T]he reason why Shakespeare and Pushkin were great writers was because from the time when they were boys they stood like policemen over their thoughts and didn't allow one small insincerity to creep in. — Michael D. O'Brien

You are a fertile God. Many seeds are dropped into the soil. Many do not sprout. Yet beneath the appearance of waste nothing is wasted, nothing lost. Giant trees crash to the forest floor, decompose, and become the soil out of which the saplings arise. Similarly, in human affairs, movements are created, rise, do Your work in the world, decline, go back into the soil, and provide the rich humus out of which new life springs. Generations come and go. Sun and rain, winter and summer, seed time and harvest. Always Your Word remains constant. Your people are called over and over, generation after generation, back into this constancy, back to this mysterious fluid stability - the only security worth having. Can You not waste a little more time on us? — Michael D. O'Brien

It is about a dragon and a prince and a princess." "Oh, lovely! Does it end happily?" "Happily for the humans. Not so well for the dragon." "Just as it should be. Commence. — Michael D. O'Brien

Your namesake dwelt on this holy mountain three thousand years ago. He came here to listen for the voice of God." Elijah waited, knowing there would be more forthcoming. The wind rummaged uneasily in the grape arbors. "He heard it in a gentle breeze, not in rushing about the world looking for projects. Our vocation is a call to listening. To adoration of the One who dwells among us. That is why you came here. That is why you were born." Elijah — Michael D. O'Brien

...life without coffee is not really life. — Michael D. O'Brien

Yet he saw that in all places there was originality, resulting from the human efforts at decoration and ingenious methods of survival. — Michael D. O'Brien

To love mankind merely in the abstract", he once said, "is one face of a single coin, and on its other side is hatred of mankind in the abstract. To love in truth is to serve the suffering person before you, and to do what you can to assist him. — Michael D. O'Brien

If you are a true logos and I am a true logos, then there is the possibility of the dia-logos - a true dialogue...What is true dialogue in a world like ours? Our world is drowning in communication, but starving for genuine communio - the union of true communion...Profound communion, the flow of celestial language, becomes possible when we are speaking on the firm foundation of the Logos, the Word who became flesh, the One who redeemed the universe. — Michael D. O'Brien

The only indestructible palace is in the heart. — Michael D. O'Brien

Men are accustomed to making objective assessments of devastating situations, as long as they are not immersed in them. Rare is he who maintains objectivity in the midst of personal affliction. — Michael D. O'Brien

the Vettore connection. — Michael D. O'Brien

No true love is possible, Lewis demonstrates, until we abandon our claims, our rights, our grievances. Until then we will be trapped in the obscurity of our heart's mixed motives, our will to possess, to control, to be our own gods. — Michael D. O'Brien

Real love is a long apprenticeship. — Michael D. O'Brien

He is interested not so much in imparting information as implanting in us the tools of awareness. — Michael D. O'Brien

When his wife died, for a while it was the end of the world, because part of him had died with her. As the long, slow recovery proceeded, he had gratefully and guiltily accepted the return of equilibrium. But he had not paid attention to a parallel phenomenon: his reversion to what he had been before his marriage. Though changed by whatever he had learned during their years together, and by whatever healing had taken place, he had fallen back into the old patterns of withdrawal. Nursing the dreadful wound of her absence, he had failed to notice the subtler void opening up within himself. — Michael D. O'Brien

Social pressure is the fascism of the democracies. Fascism is the democracy of the ruthless. Social engineering is the opiate of romantic intellectuals. — Michael D. O'Brien

Happy Christmas" was their version of "Merry Christmas," and a better version, it seemed to him, for making merry was different from making happiness. — Michael D. O'Brien

Love is the soul of the world, though its body bleeds, and we must learn to bleed with it. Love is also the seed and milk and the fruit of the world, though we can partake of it in greed or reverence. We are born, we eat, and learn, and die. We leave a tracery of messages in the lives of others, a little shifting of the soil, a stone moved from here to there, a word uttered, a song, a poem left behind. I was here, each of these declare. I was here. — Michael D. O'Brien

Old G.K. knew when to fast and when to down a good ale. It's the timing. It's all in the timing. [On G.K. Chesterton] — Michael D. O'Brien

Ow, ow, ow, Billy hurt! Billy wanna go home! — Michael D. O'Brien

A rare objectivity and insight can be imparted regarding this world's struggle for spiritual integrity. In the land of Faerie, the reader may see his small battles writ large in the wars of titans or elves and understand for the first time, his own worth. — Michael D. O'Brien

He's amazing. He's a different kind of saint, maybe a tougher kind than the Pope. — Michael D. O'Brien

They're convinced that the more conservative you are the more orthodox you are. They're more Catholic than the Pope. — Michael D. O'Brien

Abstract academic discussions have a way of leaving their mark on entire civilizations, as the events of this century have proved all too well. — Michael D. O'Brien

sweetness on the tongue and a promise of scent on the night air. It was sensual in the best meaning of that word, saturating every sense at once, so that the flesh was known, finally, as a thing of such goodness that man blessed his Creator from morning to night for having made him. Here in this medieval town where once an extraordinary little fellow had burst forth with songs to God, as a passionate lover speaks to his bride, here the restoration of man to his own true home was no longer the dream of saints. It was the wedding feast. It was a word made flesh. — Michael D. O'Brien

In this world are many people who do not master their bodies. Such people say that no one can tell them what to do, not even God, and they think that in this way they have no master. In the end they become slaves to anything. — Michael D. O'Brien

If we do not play in the dangerous surf, we will drown in puddles. — Michael D. O'Brien

Automobiles are unreliable and dangerous slaves. They frequently revolt and kill their masters. I hate them. — Michael D. O'Brien

garden. I have been defeated, — Michael D. O'Brien

The poet who sees himself as a hero or a prophet, or a priest of the socio-political forces to which he is loyal, which he believes are the historical necessities of his times, too easily becomes a puppet. He has no external measure with which to assess reality. Whether he submits to the forces or rejects them, he becomes a parody of himself, and then without knowing it submits his gifts to the demons of his era. He loses his place in the continuity of time. He becomes dependent on social affirmation and the drug of exalted feelings common to all revolutionaries. He destroys, even as he thinks he creates. — Michael D. O'Brien

Man projects his wounds upon the world, my friend. He judges everything, and in the judging he reveals himself. — Michael D. O'Brien

I'm a great fan of Chesterton, you know. He once said that he became a Catholic because we're the only religion that sees no contradiction between a pint, a pipe, and a cross. — Michael D. O'Brien

Sure I care about it, just not enough to play cards with my integrity as a poker chip. — Michael D. O'Brien

You can't just sit there hating the wound, Tan, or indulging in bitterness. Whatever you become in life, always ask yourself, am I making more life or am I making more death? — Michael D. O'Brien

All grief would slip away and all questions would be remembered as the uncomprehending wails of a newborn who did not grasp the meaning of his existence and hungered only for milk. — Michael D. O'Brien

chamberlain were just setting the table for tomorrow's breakfast. — Michael D. O'Brien

The mountains are intimations of transcendence, which he is now free to pursue, and the walking writes messages in every cell of his body, telling him that he is not locked inside a cement box, nor in a water drum, but is moving forward. — Michael D. O'Brien

Human relationships were so complicated and always veering in the direction of the irrational. — Michael D. O'Brien

We labor to preserve the life of the body, but ultimately life and death are out of our hands. If the patient lives awhile longer, a certain kind of good will result. If God ordains that this is the time to die, another kind of good will result. — Michael D. O'Brien

Our world is drowning in communication, but starving for genuine communio - the union of true communion. — Michael D. O'Brien

Tell me, Anna, if man is capable of projecting his belief onto the cosmos, isn't it possible by the same token, that he can project his unbelief onto the cosmos? — Michael D. O'Brien

Emotions, he was certain, were unreliable and irrelevant to the labor of religious faith. — Michael D. O'Brien

We are resisting the technological corruption of our humanity with technology. We're also resisting with our thinking, our perseverance, our friendships....In the end, we will find that even the best of tools can do no more than assist us. Certainly they cannot save us — Michael D. O'Brien