T.A. Barron Quotes
The creative person is both more primitive and more cultivated, more destructive, a lot madder and a lot saner, than the average person.
Every piece of the universe, even the tiniest little snow crystal, matters somehow. I have a place in the pattern, and so do you. Thinking of you this holiday season!
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 ego-drama is nothing compared with the theo-drama. The fun begins when we let God write our stories.
Beauty is the arrowhead of evangelization, the point with which the evangelist pierces the minds and hearts of those he evangelizes.
We are exceptionally good at seeing the faults in others and exceptionally adept at ignoring the faults in ourselves.
Love without truth devolves into sentimentality. Truth without love becomes cold and calculated.
Some say "The end is near," as if that is shocking news. The truth is, the end is always near. What is actually shocking is that we, ourselves, can help to choose which end.
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.
I don't think we'll understand Advent correctly until we see it as a preparation for a revolution.
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.
A creative person respects the creative spark in other individual men, and in all men (and women).
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.
Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you.
The making of thoughts is the most common instance of human participation in the creative act.
You're saying that our souls and the stars and the wings of a butterfly are all somehow connected?
I want to go up to the closest white person and say: 'You can't understand this, it's a black thing' and then slap him, just for my mental health.
The creative individual not only respects the irrational in himself, but also courts the most promising source of novelty in his own thought.
Stories help me. To live. To work. To find the meaning hidden in every dream, ever leaf, every drop of dew.
I hate dates. I sit at home all day, and I don't fart once. I go on a date and I've got twenty in the bank straight away.
The creative person pays close attention to what appears discordant and contradictory... and is challenged by such irregularities.
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.
Horror is my motor. It gets to me on an animal level and satisfies my impulse toward scenario building.
Cats do not keep the mice away; it is my belief that they preserve them for the chase.
Our public schools need to be in the control of parents and the community, as opposed to businessmen who see the $23 billion budget as a means to giving no-bid contracts to their cronies.
A life-whether seamstress or poet, farmer or king-is measured not by length, but by the worth of its deeds, and the power of its dreams.
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.
Both total accommodation to the culture and total resistance to it are usually signs of intellectual sickness.
Easter is an earthquake, an explosion. If you see it as less than that, you're not getting it.
The creative genius may be at once naive and knowledgeable, being at home equally with primitive symbolism and rigorous logic.