Quotessence
Home / Authors / Tony Hendra
Tony Hendra

Tony Hendra Quotes

Writer

Filter quotes by topic

AllCatholicCatholicismReligionBenedictineGodChristianityChristianLoveMonkSelfSpiritualBibleChangeContemptus MundiDetachmentExistenceHellLatinLifeModernity

Famous Tony Hendra Quotes

“The other day Father Prior was telling me about a French writer, Jean-Paul Sartre. An existentialist. ... One phrase of his particularly struck me: 'L'enfer c'est les autres.' Do you think he meant that as a joke?" "I don't think humor's a strong point with existentialists." "I think it's p-p-poppycock. How can Hell be others? God is manifested in others. God is the Other. That's why the self must lose itself in love for the other. It's the self we must leave behind. Better to say Hell is the Self. L'enfer c'est moi.”

LoveSelfGodSpiritualReligionSpiritualityHellMonkOthersJean Paul SartreBenedictine
Book:Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul
Create image

“People are always changing themselves and their world, dear. Very few of the changes are new. We rather confuse change and newness, I think. What is truly new never changes." "You speak in riddles, aged progenitor." "The world worships a certain kind of newness. People are always talking about a new car, or a new drink or p-p-play or house, but these things are not truly new, are they? They begin to get old the minute you acquire them. New is not in things. New is within us. The truly new is something that is new forever: you. Every morning of your life and every evening, every moment is new. You have never lived this moment before and you never will again. In this sense the new is also the eternal.”

LifeSelfSpiritualReligionChangeEternalCatholicCatholicismMonkModernityThingsNewnessBenedictine
Book:Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul
Create image

“Feelings trap us in the self, Tony dear. Doing a thing because you feel wonderful about it—even a work of charity—is in the end a selfish act. We perform the work not to feel wonderful but to know and love the other. It's the same with your romance. You may not feel your love, but God is still your loved one, your other.”

LoveSelfGodFeelingsChristianRomanceReligionChristianityEmotionsCatholicSelfishnessCatholicism
Book:Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul
Create image

“It was a music of the spirit, seeking peace, not emotional release, expressing the hunger of the soul rather than the heart. A way of sequencing notes so ancient it might be music's mother lode, its Fertile Crescent. It wouldn't have grated, I felt, on the ears of ancient Greeks or Egyptians or Mesopotamians or Sumerians—or even on the august auditory equipment of the Buddha or Lao-tzu.”

ReligionPeaceMusicChristianityCatholicAncientCatholicismBenedictineGregorian Chant
Book:Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul
Create image

“It sounds to me, dear, as if your satirist is a bit like a monk. They both take a rather dim view of the world, and both try to do something about it." "Thank you, Father Joe! I think I knew that once, but I'd forgotten. Contemptus mundi. We both have contempt for the world." "You p-p-persist in your error, my son. Contemptus does not mean 'contempt.' It means 'detachment.' Are you detached from the things you satirize?”

WorldChristianReligionReligiousChristianityCatholicLatinCatholicismMonkDetachmentBenedictineContemptus Mundi
Book:Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul
Create image

“The spiritual muscles I hadn't used for decades began to acquire some tone, and since they were Catholic muscles too, it was natural to look for a church to work out in. It was hard. Appalling though the predations exacted on the monastic liturgy were, they were nothing compared to the desecration exacted on the secular. Latin was gone entirely, replaced by dull, oppressive, anchorman English, slavishly translated from its sonorous source to be as plain and "direct" as possible. It didn't seem to have occurred to the well-meaning vandals who'd thrown out baby, bath, and bathwater that all ritual is a reaching out to the unknowable and can be accomplished only by the noncognitive: evocation, allusion, metaphor, incantation—the tools of the poet.”

ReligionWorshipMassCatholicLatinCatholicismRitualLatin Mass
Book:Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul
Create image