“Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited.”
More from Flannery O'Connor on Philosophy
“You have to quit confusing a madness with a mission.”
“...free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.”
“A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.”
“The basic experience of everyone is the experience of human limitation.”
“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”
“When something is finished, it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be possessed but the struggle.”
Others on Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein
22 quotes“The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.”
Christopher Hitchens
22 quotes“How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of...”
Nietzsche
22 quotes“One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.”
Carl Jung
21 quotes“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
Immanuel Kant
20 quotes“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
Heraclitus
19 quotes“All things flow nothing abides.”
H. L. Mencken
17 quotes“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
C.S. Lewis
15 quotes“[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
14 quotes“Consciousness is man's greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfaction...”
Samuel Beckett
14 quotes“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
Napoleon
14 quotes“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”
Isaac Asimov
13 quotes“Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.”