All institutions are prone to corruption and to the vices of their members.
Morris West

And I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.
Morris West

Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!
Morris West

I look out of this window and I think this is a cosmos, this is a huge creation, this is one small corner of it. The trees and birds and everything else and I'm part of it. I didn't ask to be put here, I've been lucky in finding myself here.
Morris West

I've always worked on the principle that if it interests me enough to write about it, then it must interest a lot of other people.
Morris West

If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.
Morris West

If you spend your whole life waiting for the storm, you'll never enjoy the sunshine.
Morris West

Man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage.
Morris West

None of us is guaranteed against failure or corruption of any kind; witness what's going on in the world in this moment, the follies of human nature and the failures of human nature.
Morris West

Once you accept the existence of God - however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him - then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things.
Morris West


One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to the total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying.
Morris West

The fact is that the learning process goes on, and so long as the voices are not stilled and the singers go on singing some of it gets through.
Morris West

There are still things I want to do but they're not necessary for me to do. I'm not clinging to anything that I can't open my hands and let go.
Morris West

Well I travelled quite a lot in the east, and one of the things that impressed me greatly was the buddhist notion of the continuity of things, the wheel of life which is what we're talking about, the ever turning wheel.
Morris West

You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage.
Morris West

You know one of the causes of modern despair is the fact that we have had proposed to us, from various quarters, an impossible perfection.
Morris West