“In Homer, existence
is flawed; transcendence, conditional;
' the journey from sin to redemption, perpetual”

“If Catholic Christianity does not offer a vision of existence that transcends the election cycle, if our redemption is social and our resurrection economic, then it’s time render everything up to Caesar.”

“I tramp a perpetual journey.”

“If Catholic literature has a central theme, it is the difficult journey of the sinner toward redemption”

“This attraction to exploration, to the unknown, to great journeys, great conquests, has always existed in the human spirit, even in very crude conditions, .... very backward conditions.”

“For my part I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.”

“Achilles exists only through Homer. Take away the art of writing from this world, and you will probably take away its glory.”

“It has been said that Homer was the Bible of the Greeks. The remark exactly misses the truth. The Greeks fortunately had no Bible, and this fact was both an expression and an important condition of their freedom. Homer's poems were secular, not religious, and it may be noted that they are freer from immorality and savagery than sacred books that one could mention.”

“The doctrine of redemption is founded on a mere pecuniary idea corresponding to that of a debt which another person might pay; and as this pecuniary idea corresponds again with the system of second redemption, obtained through the means of money given to the Church for pardons, the probability is that the same persons fabricated both the one and the other of those theories; and that, in truth there is no such thing as redemption — that it is fabulous, and that man stands in the same relative condition with his Maker as he ever did stand since man existed, and that it is his greatest consolation to think so.”

“That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.”