Quotessence
Home / Authors / Bruce Marshall

Bruce Marshall Quotes

Author

Filter quotes by topic

AllModernityPeaceWarDeathSinApathyCamaraderieCatholicismCivilizationDoctrine

Famous Bruce Marshall Quotes

“That's just the trouble really. Nobody's shocked by anything anymore; we're not shocked by deceit, cruelty, lust for power, faithlessness, money-grubbing. Indeed, we accept it as inevitable that each and every one of our fellow men should be impelled only by selfishness. Well, sir, let me say that it's stupid of us not to be shocked, because the continuation of our civilisation depends precisely upon our ability to be shocked.”

SinCivilizationShockingModernity
Book:Vespers in Vienna
Create image

“I think that the trouble of the world is this: It has never been easy to obey our Lord's commands, not even in the days when all Europeans were Christians, and did not imagine that, just because they could see planets and stars and the moon at the end of a telescope, Christ had not died for their sins and risen from the dead. That was, my colonel, the great disservice your nineteenth-century materialists did to the world: to make it more difficult to obey the Lord. For there are two ways in which men and women obey the Lord: the first is because of love, and the second is because of fear, and always more have obeyed because of the second reason than because of the first. The people who formerly obeyed because of love still obey from love, but those who used to obey because of what they were afraid was going to happen to them in the next world if they didn't, no longer do so, because the clever men have told them that the next world does not exist and that consequently after death there is neither reward of virtue nor chastisement of sin. You may not perhaps think that these things are very important, but if you wish to save European civilisation, you will be foolish not to think so.”

SinHistorySalvationModernity
Book:Vespers in Vienna
Create image

“Do you know, sometimes when I think of the unhappiness of the world, I wonder if priests and nuns are not greatly responsible for men and women not listening and not obeying more. You see, we have such a very wonderful thing to say and we say it so badly. Shall I tell you a truth? Sometimes when I read holy papers I feel like becoming a little worldly myself, because of the big phrases in which big truths are stated. For big truths are most powerful in little phrases -- but there I go preaching again, and committing the sin of spiritual pride as well, because I don't express our Lord's wisdom very wisely myself.”

WisdomTeachingDoctrineNunsEvangelization
Book:Vespers in Vienna
Create image

“The colonel thought, as he had thought in Cologne after the last war, how, when you saw them with their faces growing out of their clothes, little different those who had fought for the wrong looked from those who had fought for the right and how the hair grew in the same way on the heads of the sons of Belial as on the heads of the sons of God. Beside the great round wheel of a lorry a British and a German soldier were showing each other photographs of their families, jerking with their thumbs the syntax of understanding.”

WarHumanityPeaceCamaraderie
Book:Vespers in Vienna
Create image

“The couldn't-care-less boys, the chaps who imagined that now that the war was over there was no need for further effort, the soldiers that slopped past officers without saluting, the Very Important Persons who talked eloquent tripe with their lips and dissembled in their fatty hearts, the morons and the knaves who played for the present rather than the future, the cacklers at parties and the delighters in horses' legs, they weren't trying to try because they thought that nobody else was trying to try either. It was, of course, a contagion from which the world had always suffered, but it was much more dangerous now than in the time of Charles the Second, when boys of nineteen had not been able to destroy cathedrals by pressing buttons.”

IndifferenceApathyModernity
Book:Vespers in Vienna
Create image