Inspirational Quotes by Flannery O'Connor — Words of Wisdom for Daily Success

“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”

“If you want to get anywhere in religion, you got to keep it sweet.”

“Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”

“Children know by instinct that hell is an absence of love, and they can pick out theirs without missing.”

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”

“A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.”

“The Catholic novelist in the South will see many distorted images of Christ, but he will certainly feel that a distorted image of Christ is better than no image at all. I think he will feel a good deal more kinship with backwoods prophets and shouting fundamentalists than he will with those politer elements for whom the supernatural is an embarrassment and for whom religion has become a department of sociology or culture or personality development.”

“I'm a member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way.”

“The truth is not distorted here, but rather a distortion is used to get at truth.”

“I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's, but behind all of them, there's only one truth and that is that there is no truth... No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.”

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds the emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints . . .”

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.”

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

“It does not take much to make us realize what fools we are, but the little it takes is long in coming.”

“When there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the spiritual is apt gradually to be lost.”

“The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.”

“He had a look of composed dissatisfaction, as if he understood life thoroughly.”

“You know," Daddy said, "it's some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it's others has to know why it is, and this boy is one of the latters. He's going to be into everything!”

“Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.”

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”

“I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”

“Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”