Once you have grace, I said to him, you are free. Without it, you cannot help doing the things you know you should not do, and that you know you don't really want to do.

If he desires what is good his temper can become the controlled instrument for fighting the evil that is in himself and helping other men to overcome the obstacles which they meet in the world. He remains free to desire either good or evil.

we too easily assume that we are our real selves, and that our choices are really the ones we want to make when, in fact, our acts of free choice are (though morally imputable, no doubt) largely dictated by psychological compulsions, flowing from our inordinate ideas of our own importance.

There are different kinds of fear. One of the most terrible is the sensation that you are likely to become, at any moment, the protagonist in a Graham Greene novel: the man who tries to be virtuous and who is, in a certain sense, holy, and yet who is overwhelmed by sin as if there were a kind of fatality about it.

concupiscence

What a dire time to be attracted to men.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

An institution which is populare because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

The reality is that everyone is responsible for their own life. We're dealt certain cards at birth, and we play our hand; some of us lose, but others may play skillfully from the same bad hand and triumph. Our cards determine who we are: age, gender, race, family, nationality, etc., and we can't change them, only play them to the best of our abilities. The game is marked by challenges and chances, strategizing and cheating.

The reality is that everyone is responsible for their own life. We're dealt certain cards at birth, and we play our hand; some of us lose, but others may play skillfully from the same bad hand and triumph.