Cardinal Newman Quotes

Choose love not in the shallows but in the deep.

With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty. We are bid to color all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in every event.

Animals have done us no harm and they have no power of resistance. There is something so very dreadful in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.

To live is to change, and to change often is to become more perfect.

Health of body and mind is a great blessing, if we can bear it.

A university training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society…It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them and a force in urging them.

Cruelty to animals is as if man did not love God . . . there is something so dreadful, so satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, and who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.” —Cardinal John Henry Newman

From My Life's Work by Cardinal Newman God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next...I shall do good. I shall do His work if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling. Therefore I will trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am. I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us. He does nothing in vain.

There is something so very dreadful, so satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power." -Cardinal John Henry Newman

I am speaking of University Education, which implies an extended range of reading, which has to deal with standard works of genius, or what are called the classics of a language: and I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of a sinful man.

Few people would realise that it is much harder to write one of Owen Seaman's "funny" poems in Punch than to write one of the Archbishop of Canterbury's sermons. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a greater work than Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Charles Dickens's creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race—I say it in all seriousness—than Cardinal Newman's Lead, Kindly Light, Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.

The Idea of the University, Cardinal John Henry Newman’s great work defining how the republic of the mind should be governed, hailed the importance of increasing the breadth of understanding, promoting excellence in scholarship, advancing student dialogue and freedom of expression and inquiry.

And this is the sense of the word "grammar" which our inaccurate student detests, and this is the sense of the word which every sensible tutor will maintain. His maxim is "a little, but well"; that is, really know what you say you know: know what you know and what you do not know; get one thing well before you go on to a second; try to ascertain what your words mean; when you read a sentence, picture it before your mind as a whole, take in the truth or information contained in it, express it in your own words, and, if it be important, commit it to the faithful memory. Again, compare one idea with another; adjust truths and facts; form them into one whole, or notice the obstacles which occur in doing so. This is the way to make progress; this is the way to arrive at results; not to swallow knowledge, but (according to the figure sometimes used) to masticate and digest it.

MAURY: What is a gentleman, anyway? ANTHONY: A man who never has pins under his coat lapel. MAURY: Nonsense! A man's social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich. DICK: He's a man who prefers the first edition of a book to the last edition of a newspaper. RACHAEL: A man who never gives an impersonation of a dope-fiend. MAURY: An American who can fool an English butler into thinking he's one. MURIEL: A man who comes from a good family and went to Yale or Harvard or Princeton, and has money and dances well, and all that. MAURY: At last—the perfect definition! Cardinal Newman's is now a back number.

The Second Vatican Council, much influenced by Newman’s thinking, spoke of the assent of the mind and will to Catholic doctrine, even if all dimensions of a doctrine are not understood. Without such assent, we try to meet God on our terms rather than His. This is futile at best and spiritually destructive at worst.

It is often asserted that education is breaking down because of overspecialisation. But this is only a partial and misleading diagnosis. Specialisation is not in itself a faulty principle of education. What would be the alternative - an amateurish smattering of all major subjects? Or a lengthy studium generale in which men are forced to spend their time sniffing at subjects which they do not wish to pursue, while they are being kept away from what they want to learn? This cannot be the right answer, since it can only lead to the type of intellectual man, whom Cardinal Newman castigated -'an intellectual man, as the world now conceives of him. ,..one who is full of "views" on all subjects of philosophy, on all matters of the day'. Such 'viewiness' is a sign of ignorance rather than knowledge. 'Shall I teach you the meaning of knowledge?' said Confucius. 'When you know a thing to recognise that you know it, and when you do not, to know that you do not know - that is knowledge.' What is at fault is not specialisation, but the lack of depth with which the subjects are usually presented, and the absence of meta- physical awareness. The sciences are being taught without any awareness of the presuppositions of science, of the meaning and significance of scientific laws, and of the place occupied by the natural sciences within the whole cosmos of human thought. The result is that the presuppositions of science are normally mistaken for its findings. Economics is being taught without any awareness of the view of human nature that underlies present-day economic theory. In fact, many economists are themselves unaware of the fact that such a view is implicit in their teaching and that nearly all their theories would have to change if that view changed. How could there be a rational teaching of politics without pressing all questions back to their metaphysical roots? Political thinking must necessarily become confused and end in 'double-talk' if there is a continued refusal to admit the serious study of the meta- physical and ethical problems involved. The confusion is already so great that it is legitimate to doubt the educational value of studying many of the so-called humanistic subjects. I say 'so- called' because a subject that does not make explicit its view of human nature can hardly be called humanistic. All

I know a ton of poetry by heart,” Tartt says, when I comment on her recital of the Nabokov rhyme. It’s true. She has an alarming ability to simply break into passages, short or long, from her favorite writing. She quotes, freely and naturally, from Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal Newman, Buddha, and Plato—as well as David Byrne of Talking Heads and Jonathan Richman of the Modem Lovers. And many others. “When I was a little kid, first thing I memorized were really long poems by A. A. Milne,” she says. ‘‘Then I went through a Kipling phase. I could say ‘Gunga Din’ for you. Then I went into sort of a Shakespeare phase, when I was about in sixth grade. In high school, I loved loved loved Edgar Allan Poe. Still love him. I could say ‘Annabel Lee’ for you now. I used to know even some of the shorter stories by heart. ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’—I used to be able to say that. ‘‘I still memorize poems,” she says. ‘‘I know ‘The Waste Land’ by heart. ‘Prufrock.’ Yeats is good. I know a lot of poems in French by heart. A lot of Dante. That’s just something that has always come easily to me. I also know all these things that I was made to learn. I’m sort of this horrible repository of doggerel verse.

إننا لا نملك أنفسنا أكثر مما نملك ما بأيدينا. إننا لم نخلق أنفسنا ، ولا نستطيع أن نعلو على أنفسنا. لسنا سادة على أنفسنا. نحن ملك لله. أليست سعادتنا إذن في هذه النظرة إلى الموضوع؟ هل نسعد أو نطمئن إذا ظننا أننا ملك لأنفسنا؟ قد يحسب ذلك الشباب والمترفون. قد يظن هؤلاء أن تسيير الأمور على هواهم - دون الاعتماد على أحد - أمر عظيم ، فلا يفكرون في شئ بعيد عن الأنظار ، ويخلصون من مشقة الاعتراف الدائم ، والصلاة المتصلة ، ونسبة أعمالهم دائما إلى إرادة غير إرادتهم . ولكن كلما تقدم الزمن أدركوا - كما أدرك الرجال الآخرون جميعا - أن الاستقلال لم يخلق للإنسان ، وأنه حاة غير طبيعية ، وأنه قد يغنينا فترة من الزمن ، ولكنه لن يحملنا آمنين حتى النهاية الكاردينال نيومان (cardinal John Henry Newman)

I protest once for all, before men and Angels, that sin shall no more have dominion over me. This Lent I make myself God's own for ever. The salvation of my soul shall be my first concern. With the aid of His grace I will create in me a deep hatred and sorrow for my past sins. I will try hard to detest sin, as much as I have ever loved it. Into God's hands I put myself, not by halves, but unreservedly. I promise Thee, O Lord, with the help of Thy grace, to keep out of the way of temptation, to avoid all occasions of sin, to turn at once from the voice of the Evil One, to be regular in my prayers, so to die to sin that Thou mayest not have died for me on the Cross in vain. Pater,

Plus tard, un jeune professeur de philosophie, rompu à l'analyse logique, fit, sans le vouloir peut-être, la théorie de cette pratique politique (*). Il la dévoila avec la plus grande clarté, précisément parce que, étant un pur logicien et de bonne foi, il était aveugle aux leçons de l'histoire (2). Au lieu de mettre cette pratique au compte d'une époque, d'un pays, d'une structure social ou d'un homme, il la mit directement en relation avec les préceptes de la religion. Il alla jusqu'à faire l'apologie de la 'ubudiyya (servitude) islamique, opposé au concept de muwatana (citoyenneté) hellénique. Ce professeur ignorait sans doute que le procès de la modernité et de la démocratie était courant au 19e siècle, même en Angleterre, patrie du libéralisme politique. Il n'avait qu'à revenir à l'autobiographie du cardinal Newman, qui retrace les étapes de sa conversion au catholicisme romain, pour retrouver l'essentiel de son argumentation. Ce qu'on peut lui reprocher, c'est qu'il se souciait peu des mobiles de sa pensée ; il s'attribuait une logique qui était celle des faits, non celle des concepts qu'il s'acharnait à redéfinir ; il ne voyait pas qu'elle soutenait une politique éducative, poursuivie par différents moyens depuis plus d'une génération. Qu'un philosophe se décide, à une certaine étape de sa carrière, de s'affilier à l'un des ordres les plus fermés à l'influence du monde moderne, qu'il arrive par la seule force de ses déductions - c'est du moins ce que je présume, peut-être à tort - à justifier une totale démission de l'esprit, à refuser l'idée de citoyenneté, à accepter d'investir un homme, chef d'Etat ou dirigeant de confrérie, d'une pouvoir absolu, prouve à quel point cette politique avait réussi et combien l'individu est malléable. (*)créer, ou de recréer un type d'homme qui fut spontanément en phase à la fois avec son environement moderne et son héritage politique et social." (2) (Hawla Tajdid Taqyim A-turath) chapitre XI, pp 133-134

As Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman has pointed out, “Son and Mother went together; and the experience of three centuries has confirmed their testimony, for Catholics who have honoured the Mother, still worship the Son, while Protestants, who now have ceased to confess the Son, began then by scoffing at the Mother.”11 Newman experienced this firsthand in post-Reformation England, but it is also clear that mainline Protestantism has lost much of its faith—particularly as it capitulates further with secular and godless cultural trends. What Newman and others have recognized is that devotion to Mary doesn’t mean passivity; rather, her “spiritual motherhood promotes a childlike docility and expectation with regard to her ability and authority to form us into other Christs.”12 Many of the saints have testified to the transformation that has taken place in their lives because of their devotion to her.

As John Henry Cardinal Newman says: “Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and pride of man.”10 The idea of giving God everything sounded good in principle; living it was another matter. I did not know if I could give him that. But I sensed that if I didn’t, if I did not say Yes, step by step, I would follow the path of the fallen angels who said, “I will not serve.

It is usually an act of vanity to assume that the world is sufficiently interested in one’s personality to spend twelve-and-six on one’s autobiography. Nowadays autobiographers either begin early in life and describe their reactions to daffodils, and Greek statues of boys, and God, and the Oxford Union, and the rugged kindliness of their dear old father, and so on, or else they wait till they are ninety and babble of crinolines, and the Tranby Croft scandal, and what Cardinal Newman thought of Disestablishment. Both of these types are consumed with vanity. They really think that an elegant dislike of calceolarias, or a recollection of John Brown’s repartee to Queen Victoria outside Crathie Church on an autumnal afternoon in 1878, is the sort of thing which the world wants to know. But for myself, I am not concerned with vanity.

In 1879, the English theologian John Henry Newman addressed “liberalism in religion” in his so-called “Biglietto Speech,” given in Rome on the occasion of his being named a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII. His analysis of the subject—the “one great mischief” that he had resisted for fifty years—remains unsurpassed.4 The directness of Newman’s assault on liberal religion surprised many people. He had been seen as ill at ease with the Catholic Church’s direction during the pontificate of Leo’s predecessor, Pius IX, and his misgivings about the opportuneness of the definition of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council (1869–1870) were well known. But those who had followed Newman’s thought over the course of his career would have recognized the opposition to liberalism that had been there from the beginning. In his Biglietto Speech, Newman identified a number of doctrines of liberal religion: (1) “that there is no positive truth in religion,” (2) “that one creed is as good as another,” (3) that no religion can be recognized as true for “all are matters of opinion,” (4) that “revealed religion is not a truth, but a sentiment and a taste; not an objective faith, not miraculous,” and (5) that “it is the right of each individual to make it say just what strikes his fancy.

Cardinal Newman said that to be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant. The truth is that to be deep in real history, as opposed to Rome’s whitewashed, revisionist, and often forged history, is to cease to be a Roman Catholic.

It is fashionable today to praise the Church of the first four centuries, to extol primative practice. How would the Church of the first four centuries have regarded Archbishop Whealon? Anyone who is remotely acquainted with Church history can give one answer and one answer only. Archbishop Whealon would have been regarded as an apostate; he would have been anathemized, and every true Catholic bishop would have broken off communion with him. I believe that the Church of the first four centuries was right. I believe that Archbishop Whealon is at least a de facto apostate. It seems a harsh thing to say. It may make me appear harsh and intolerant - but nonetheless it is the truth. Cardinal Newman has a magnificent sermon upon this very point, "Tolerance of Religious Error". He castigates those who concern us not to uphold truth but to avoid the appearance of being intolerant. Once again I must repeat, those who possess the truth, those who love the truth, cannot tolerate error . . . Furthermore, I submit that Archbishop Whealon's conduct would have been considered incompatible with Catholicism not only by the Church of the first four centuries - it would have resulted in his immediate excommunication by every Roman Pontiff up to and including Pope John XXIII. I accept that what I am saying will make me appear singular, intemperate, and extreme in the ecumenical climate of the Conciliar Church but the viewpoint I am putting forward would have been accepted by 99% of Catholics up to Vatican II. Read the encyclical Mortalium Animos of Pope Pius XI, read the relevant encyclicals of Pope Pius XII. If Archbishop Whealon is right, the the Church has been wrong for 2,000 years. (chapter 8)

If you use slang use the refined kind and use it like a gentleman, that it will not hurt or give offense to any one. Cardinal Newman defined a gentleman as he who never inflicts pain. Be a gentleman in your slang—never inflict pain.

Repetition is the mother of learning.  John Cardinal Newman used the illustration of the coffee percolator.  As the water heats up it rises and flows over the coffee grounds.  Each time it does this the coffee gets stronger and stronger.  And so it is with these truths.  Each time we go over them our understanding and conviction of them gets stronger.

Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–90) expressed an exceptionally strong distaste for any theology that supports itself by leaning on the vapid criterion of design. Even before Darwin published the Origin of Species, Newman had written in 1852 that William Paley’s design-oriented natural theology could “not tell us one word about Christianity proper,” and that it “cannot be Christian, in any true sense, at all.” Paley’s brand of theology, Newman goes on, “tends, if it occupies the mind, to dispose it against Christianity.” For Newman, in other words, it is not the task of theology to discover a divine designer lurking immediately beneath or behind the data of biology or physics.7

All the din and clatter of the streets, all the great factories which dominate our landscape are only echoes and shadows if you think of them for a moment in the light of eternity; the reality is in here, is there above the altar, is that part of it which our eyes cannot see and our senses cannot distinguish. The motto on Cardinal Newman’s tomb ought to be the funeral motto of every Catholic: ‘Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem’, it says. Out of the shadows and appearances into the truth. When death brings us into another world the experience will not be that of one who falls asleep and dreams, but that of one who wakes from a dream into the full light of day. Here, we are so surrounded by the things of sense that we take them for the full reality. Only sometimes we have a glimpse which corrects that wrong perspective. And above all when we see the Blessed Sacrament enthroned we should look up towards that white disc which shines in the monstrance as towards a chink through which, just for a moment, the light of the other world shines through.

The biography of John Wesley is surely unique. Here is a man born in the first decade of his century, who sees it through into the last; a man so far in reaction from the tendencies of his age that he seems a living commentary on them, yet so much the child of his age that you cannot think of him as fitting in with any other. A High Churchman in his youth, he makes for himself in the unsympathetic surroundings of Oxford an enclave of primitive observance and of ascetic living; such is his personal influence that he seems destined, if that were possible, to shake Oxford out of its long dream. Dis aliter visum; he undergoes an experience of conversion before his lifetime has reached its mid-point. A sensational conversion; the finished product of the schools becomes the disciple of a foreign visitor to our shores, by no means his match in intellect. Thenceforward, he must fight by other methods, and for the most part with other companions, that battle against irreligion to which he has dedicated his youth. He has made his own soul, but the battle is not yet over; he finds himself in conflict with the men who had been his closest comrades in arms, and who still share his own beliefs but exaggerate their emphasis in a degree which he thinks dangerous. A man who once seemed likely to do great things for the Church of England, yet whose influence, on the whole, was to damage her position in the eyes of his contemporaries; a man, nevertheless, who lived to see something of the old bitterness against him die down, whose age was cheered by public recognition at once welcome, unsought, and unexpected. So far, however, there is nothing unique about John Wesley. A careful reperusal of the foregoing paragraph will show that it all applies equally to the career of Cardinal Newman. Wesley and Newman-you might think that some elfin fate had arranged this odd consent between the stars of the two men, just so as to throw into relief the vast difference there was between them. Newman, so sensitive, so warm in his attachments, so revealing in This content downloaded from his literary confidences, Wesley, so unruffled by opposition, so half-hearted in his familiarities, so circumspect in his admissions; Newman, the recluse, Wesley, a lifelong vagabond in the service of his gospel; Newman, painstaking in his judgements, fastidious in his style, Wesley, leaping to infallible conclusions and throwing them at you with the first words that came to hand; Newman, such a child of the Renaissance, Wesley, so fundamentally a Puritan. And, deeper down, Newman the apostle of religious authority, Wesley, a cheerful experimentalist who in all the hesitations of a lifetime never asked himself by what right he ruled, or on what basis of intellectual certainty he believed.

There is something so very dreadful, so satanic, in tormenting those who have never harmed us, who cannot defend themselves, who are utterly in our power.' -Cardinal John Henry Newman

They say that it is the fear of death and of what comes after death that makes men turn to religion as they advance in years. But my own experience has given me the conviction that, quite apart from any such terrors or imaginings, the religious sentiment tends to develop as we grow older; to develop because, as the passions grow calm, as the fancy and sensibilities are less excitable, our reason becomes less troubled in its working, less obscured by the images, desires and distractions, in which it used to be absorbed; whereupon God emerges from behind a cloud; our soul feels, sees, turns towards the source of all light; turns naturally and inevitably; for now that all that gave to the world of sensations its life and charms have begun to leak away from us, now that phenomenal existence is no more bolstered up by impressions from within or from without, we feel the need to lean on something that abides, something that will never play us false - a reality, an absolute and everlasting truth. Yes, we inevitably turn to God; for this religious sentiment is of its nature so pure, so delightful to the soul that experiences it, that it makes up to us for all our other losses.

Since the Church is the living voice of Tradition, as Cardinal Newman said,17 the Tradition has to be applied in circumstances that present themselves over time, and challenges need to be met.

The whole course of Christianity from the first ... is but one series of troubles and disorders. Every century is like every other, and to those who live in it seems worse than all times before it. The Church is ever ailing ... Religion seems ever expiring, schisms dominant, the light of truth dim, its adherents scattered. The cause of Christ is ever in its last agony.

As obedience to conscience, even supposing conscience ill-informed, tends to the improvement of our moral nature, and ultimately of our knowledge, so obedience to our ecclesiastical superior may subserve our growth in illumination and sanctity, even though he should command what is extreme or inexpedient, or teach what is external to his legitimate province.