Ronald Knox > Quotes

“There was a young man who said "God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the quad."

Reply:
"Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.”
― Ronald Knox

“It is possible to argue that the true business of faith is not to produce emotional conviction in us, but to teach us to do without it.”
― Ronald Knox, A Retreat for Lay People

“Hope is something that is demanded of us; it is not, then, a mere reasoned calculation of our chances. Nor is it merely the bubbling up of a sanguine temperament; if it is demanded of us, it lies not in the temperament but in the will... Hoping for what? For delivereance from persecution, for immunity from plague, pestilence, and famine...? No, for the grace of persevering in his Christian profession, and for the consequent achievement of a happy immortality. Strictly speaking, then, the highest exercise of hope, supernaturally speaking, is to hope for perseverance and for Heaven when it looks, when it feels, as if you were going to lose both one and the other.”
― Ronald Knox

“You must believe, sooner or later, in a Mind which brought mind into existence out of matter, unless you are going to sit down before the hopeless metaphysical contradiction of saying that matter somehow managed to develop itself into mind.”
― Ronald A. Knox, In Soft Garments: A Collection of Oxford Conferences

“If a man tells you that he is fond of the Imitation, view him with sudden suspicion; he is either a dabbler or a Saint.”
― Ronald A. Knox

“Order is the cipher by which Mind speaks to mind in the midst of chaos.”
― Ronald A. Knox, In Soft Garments: A Collection of Oxford Conferences

“The motor-car, in brining us all closer together, by making it easy to have luncheon two counties away, has driven us all further apart, by making it unnecessary for us to know the people in the next bungalow. And so, once again, we have to thank civilization for nothing.”
― Ronald Knox, Barchester Pilgrimage

“Can anything matter, unless there is Somebody who minds?”
― Ronald A. Knox, In Soft Garments: A Collection of Oxford Conferences

“When suave politeness, tempering bigot zeal, corrected 'I believe' to 'one does feel'.

”
― Ronald Knox

“Protestants sometimes laugh at us because we address ourselves, now to our Lady of Perpetual Succor, now to our Lady of Good Counsel, now to our Lady of Lourdes, and so on, as if they were so many different people. But the case is much worse than that, if they only knew; every individual Catholic has a separate our Lady to pray to, his Mother, the one who seems to care for him individually, has won him so many favours, has stood by him in so many difficulties, as if she had no other thought or business in heaven but to watch over him.”
― Ronald Knox, A Retreat for Lay People

“The world knows that Catholics have a high standard of purity. But the world is not going to be impressed unless it is assured that Catholics keep it.”
― Ronald Knox, Captive Flames: On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes

“When the dogma of the Assumption was defined a friend of mine, a very intelligent Mohammedan, congratulated me on the gesture which the Holy Father had made; a gesture (said he) against materialism. And I think he was right. When our Lord took his blessed Mother, soul and body, into heaven, he did honour to the poor clay of which our human bodies are fashioned. It was the first step towards reconciling all things in heaven and earth to his eternal Father, towards making all things new. "The whole of nature", St Paul tells us, "groans in a common travail all the while. And not only do we see that, but we ourselves do the same; we ourselves although we have already begun to reap our spiritual harvest, groan in our hearts, waiting for that adoption which is the ransoming of our bodies from their slavery." That transformation of our material bodies to which we look forward one day has been accomplished—we know it now for certain-in her.

When the Son of God came to earth, he came to turn our hearts away from earth, Godwards. And as the traveller, shading his eyes while he contemplates some long vista of scenery, searches about for a human figure that will give him the scale of those distant surroundings, so we, with dazzled eyes looking Godwards, identify and welcome one purely human figure close to his throne. One ship has rounded the headland, one destiny is achieved, one human perfection exists. And as we watch it, we see God clearer, see God greater, through this masterpiece of his dealings with mankind.”
― Ronald Knox

“A rush age cannot be a reflective age.”
― Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics

“1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
9. The "sidekick" of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.”
― Ronald A. Knox

“We can only abandon the Catholic Church for some spiritual home which is more of a home than the Catholic Church . . . Where are we to bind such a revelation, such a spiritual home, such sources of inspiration? Nowhere; there is no other system in the world which does even to claim what the Catholic Church claims. Are we to abandon the Catholic faith for something less than the Catholic faith?”
― Ronald Knox, The Pastoral Sermons of Ronald A. Knox

“We Catholics have not only to do our best to keep down our own warring passions and live decent lives, which will often be hard enough in this odd world we have been born into. We have to bear witness to moral principles which the world owned yesterday and has begun to turn its back on today. We have to disapprove of some of the things our neighbors do, without being stuffy about it; we have to be charitable towards our neighbors and make great allowances for them, without falling into the mistake of condoning their low standards and so encouraging them to sin. Two of the most difficult and delicate tasks a man can undertake; and it happens, nowadays, not only to priests, to whom it comes as part of their professional duty, but to ordinary lay people...So we must know what are the unalterable principles we hold, and why we hold them; we must see straight in a world that is full of moral fog.”
― Ronald A. Knox, In Soft Garments: A Collection of Oxford Conferences

“Your see, it is no ordinary task. If you translate, say, the Summa of St. Thomas, you expect to be cross-examined by people who understand philosophy and by people who understand Latin; no one else. If you translate the Bible, you are liable to be cross-examined by anybody; because everybody thinks he knows already what the Bible means.”
― Ronald Knox

“The only logic which succeeded in convincing the Protestants of their fallacy was the logic of facts. So long as nobody except scoffers and atheists challenged the truth of the scriptural narratives, the doctrine of inspiration maintained its curiously inflated credit. Then Christians, nay, even clergymen, began to wonder about Genesis, began to have scruples about the genuineness of 2 Peter. And then, quite suddenly, it becomes apparent that there was no reason why Protestants should not doubt the inspiration of the Bible; it violated no principle in their system. The Evangelicals protested, but theirs was a sentimental rather than a reasoned protest. … For three centuries the inspired Bible had been a handy stick to beat Catholics with; then it broke in the hand that wielded it, and Protestantism flung it languidly aside.”
― Ronald Knox

“Roman Catholics have always been able to appeal to the traditions of holy Mother the Church. But the Church of England, as such, has nothing to appeal to. How can we [Anglicans] pretend to appeal to Church traditions, when we have cut ourselves off from the main stream of it and any exposition of it must needs be a raking up of old dead documents, instead of obedience to a living voice? And how can we pretend to appeal to the Bible, when the Bible is for everyman's private interpretation, and not expounded by authority?”
― Ronald Knox, University and Anglican Sermons of Ronald A. Knox

“Dogmas may fly out at the window but congregations do not come in at the door.”
― Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, The Belief of Catholics

“It is an infinitely small point, but does the abandonment, total or partial, of the clerical garb by some modern clergymen really make the laity feel more at home with them?”
― Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics

“It appears, then, that the two processes are going on side by side, the decline of Church membership and the decline of dogma; the evacuation of the pew and the jettisoning of cargo from the pulpit.”
― Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics

“But in disclaiming the dead, you are yourself disclaimed by the dead. If you are not prepared to blush for Alexander the Sixth, it is childishly inconsistent to take pride in the memory of Saint Francis.”
― Ronald Arbuthnott Knox

“The study of history shows you a fairly steady advance in material comforts, in scientific knowledge, and so on; but to determine whether man is happier in once century than in another is a fool's task.”
― Ronald Knox, God and the Atom

“The influence of religion upon conduct in its widest extent; the question whether 'duty' exists, or whether kindness is the only thing that matters; the value to be attached to purity, or decency, or self-control- all these questions, as if by an organized conspiracy, they leave on one side. They may have held that purity is a superstition and self-control a crime against nature, but why did they not say so? They leave off talking about religion just where becomes interesting to two Englishmen in every three. They make the old Victorian assumption, which in our time has patently broken down, that you can obliterate the religious beliefs of a nation without affecting its standards of morality. Ideally of course you can; ideally the pagan has the same ethical duties as the Christian. But in practice, after so many centuries of identification, religion and morals are deeply interconnected. And that plain fact is that whereas our fathers asked themselves whether the creed was true, their sons are asking whether the Ten Commandments matter.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“No preacher would deliberately judge the credibility of his message by the credulity of his audience. But the prevalent irreligion of the age does exercise a continual unconscious pressure upon the pulpit; it makes preachers hesitate to affirm doctrines whose affirmation would be unpopular. And a doctrine which has ceased to be affirmed is doomed, like a disused organ, to atrophy. That”
― Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics

“I have suggested above, the pilots of our storm-tossed denominations have lost no opportunity of lightening ship by jettisoning every point of doctrine that seemed questionable, and therefore unessential; hell has been abolished, and sin very nearly; the Old Testament is never alluded to but with a torrent of disclaimers, and miracle with an apologetic grimace.”
― Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics

“The Muse of detective fiction – she must surely exist by now – has one disadvantage as compared with her sisters; she cannot tell a plain unvarnished tale throughout. If she did, there could be no mystery, no situation, no dénouement; the omniscience of the author and the omnipresence of the reader, walking hand in hand, would lay waste the trail; no clue would be left undiscovered, no detail lack its due emphasis.”
― Ronald Knox, The Footsteps at the Lock

“Don’t start by thinking of him as a sort of cosy Friend waiting to listen to you and wanting to be told how abominably you were treated in geography class; that’s all right for later on, but the first thing is to grovel.”
― Ronald Knox

“Prayer, to me, is committing my aspirations, however childish, to a Power which, if I ask for a stone, will nevertheless give me the bread I need.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]