Robert Barron quotes:

Again, I hear almost everyday from atheists who write off religion as primitive, premodern nonsense. I summon Aquinas, Augustine, Paul [of Tarsus], Teresa of Avila, Joseph Ratzinger, and Edith Stein-in all their intellectual rigor-as allies in the the struggle against this dismissive atheism.

The long nights that Pier Giorgio Frassati spent on his knees in front of the Blessed Sacrament had something to do with the long days spent in service of the poor.

Bob Dylan said, "The executioner's face is always well-hidden". That's the problem: The cross pulls that hood off.

The Bible constantly warns against a merely mercenary relationship with God - a friendship of convenience or self-interest. We should not love God simply because doing so will produce many consolations in our life. We must enter a true relationship, were we fall in love not with His benefits, but with Him.

Catholicism is a matter of the body and the senses as much as it is a matter of the mind, precisely because the Word became flesh.

I don't think we'll understand Advent correctly until we see it as a preparation for a revolution.

The holiness of God is like a white light: pure, simple, complete. But when that light shines, as it were, through the prisms of individual human lives, it breaks into an infinite variety of colors... each one reveals a unique dimension of the divine holiness.

The human race is one big dysfunctional family.

In a way, fasting is like the "calming of the monkey mind" effected by the rosary prayer: both are means of stilling the effervescence of relatively superficial preoccupations.

A story can sing the truth and not just tell it.

Beauty is the arrowhead of evangelization.

Christians have no business moping around.

The ego-drama is nothing compared with the theo-drama. The fun begins when we let God write our stories.

The minute you walk outside of your church on Sunday you're in mission territory.

If the Word truly became flesh, then God had not only a mother, but also a grandmother, cousins, great-aunts, and weird uncles. If the Word truly dwelt among us, then he was part of a family that, like most, was fairly dysfunctional, a mix of the good and bad, the saintly and the sinful, the glorious and the not so glorious. And this is such good news for us.

The only thing particularly new about the "new atheism" is its nastiness.

The great danger of the new media is that it seems to relish the superficial. There has been an ethos within the Church for many years to pursue an accommodationist strategy in regards to the culture, and this has resulted in a public presentation of the Faith that is often nebulous or "dumbed down."

Beauty is the arrowhead of evangelization, the point with which the evangelist pierces the minds and hearts of those he evangelizes.

Begin with the beautiful, which leads you to the good, which leads you to the truth.

Both total accommodation to the culture and total resistance to it are usually signs of intellectual sickness.

By far the most dangerous people in the world are optimists (those who believe that all can be made well here below). If you think all can be made well in this world, then you will go to any extreme to make it happen. There is the story of the 20th century. As Lenin said, "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs".

Christ's invitation to the priesthood is an invitation to a way of life that is athletic in its intensity and heroic in its form.

Easter is an earthquake, an explosion. If you see it as less than that, you're not getting it.

For many people, the big feast of the year is Christmas, but for Christians, the truly great feast is Easter. Without Easter, without the Resurrection, we would not have the gift of salvation. Jesus had to rise from the dead or else he would have just been another failed Messiah and his birth would be a forgotten footnote of history.

God is a placebo for your own mortality.

Hans Urs von Balthasar maintained that the best evangelistic strategy is to capture people with the beautiful, then enchant them with the good, and then lead them to the true.

Love is not a sentiment or feeling. Love is actively willing the good of the other.

Love without truth devolves into sentimentality. Truth without love becomes cold and calculated.

The cross is Jesus going into the very lair of death. He goes to meet head-on that which frightens us the most. And what does He do? He battles it. He engages it. And finally he conquers it.

The slightest cooperation with God's grace can provoke a massive spiritual change.

The surest sign that God is alive in you is joy.

There's no way up but down.

Turn your car into a monastery.

We are exceptionally good at seeing the faults in others and exceptionally adept at ignoring the faults in ourselves.

We have laws against polluting our rivers but not against polluting our minds.

We need to mock false gods publicly.

When God went to the cross he made even death itself a place of hope.

Your faith will grow only in the measure that you give it away.