“One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing.” LifeInspirationalDarknessCourageKnowingDoubtRiskPoeticLiving Life To The Fullest Author:Morris L. West
“The man who does good in doubt must have so much more merit than one who does it in the bright certainty of belief. "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold..." A warning against the smugness of inherited faith.” FaithHumilityGiacomo Nerone Book:The Devil's Advocate Source: The Devil's Advocate
“Other priests, he knew, found an intense pleasure in the raw, salty dialect of peasant conversation. They picked up pearls of wisdom and experience over a farmhouse table or a cup of wine in a workingman's kitchen. They talked with equal familiarity to the rough-tongued whores of Trastevere and the polished signori of Parioli. They enjoyed the ribald humor of the fish market as much as the wit of a Cardinal's dinner table. They were good priests too, and they did much good for their people, with a singular satisfaction to themselves.” ChristianityHumility Book:The Devil's Advocate Source: The Devil's Advocate
“Each of us can walk only the path he sees at his own feet. Each of us is subject to the consequences of his own belief.” BeliefGiacomo Nerone Book:The Devil's Advocate Source: The Devil's Advocate
“I was lost a long time, without knowing it. Without the Faith, one is free, and that is a pleasant feeling at first. There are no questions of conscience, no constraints, except the constraints of custom, convention and the law, and these are flexible enough for most purposes. It is only later that terror comes. One is free - but free in chaos, in an unexplained and unexplainable world. One is free in a desert, from which there is no retreat but inward, toward the hollow core of oneself. There is nothing to build on but the small rock of one's own pride, and this is a nothing, based on nothing... I think, therefore I am. But what am I? An accident of disorder, going no place.” BeliefAtheismGiacomo Nerone Book:The Devil's Advocate Source: The Devil's Advocate
“We are ants on the carcass of the world, spawned out of nothing, going busily nowhere. One of us dies, the others crawl over us to the pickings.” LifeDeathGiacomo Nerone Book:The Devil's Advocate Source: The Devil's Advocate
“Even in sin, the act of love -done with love- is shadowed with divinity. Its conformity may be at fault, but its nature is not altered, and its nature is creative, communicative, splendid in surrender. It was in the splendor of my surrender to Nina and she to me, that I first understood how a man might surrender himself to God -if a God existed. The moment of love is a moment of union -of body and spirit- and the act of faith is mutual and implicit.” GodFaithSexSexualityGiacomo Nerone Book:The Devil's Advocate Source: The Devil's Advocate