Quotes about Flesh

Here is the answer, after all these years, to the mysterious words in the Gospel of the Incarnation which stated that Our Blessed Mother laid her "firstborn" in the manger. Did that mean that Our Blessed Mother was to have other children? It certainly did, but not according to the flesh. Our Divine Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was the unique Son of Our Blessed Mother by the flesh. But Our Lady was to have other children, not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit!

As Our Lord obtained the first elements of His own human Body from a woman, so for the Eucharist He takes bread and wine from the earth. The bread and wine are thus representative of mankind. Two of the substances which have most widely nourished man are bread and wine. Bread has been called the marrow of the earth; wine, its very blood. In giving what has traditionally made our flesh and blood, we are equivalently offering all mankind on the paten.

One can well believe that a crown of thorns, and that steel nails were less terrible to the flesh of our Savior than our modern indifference which neither scorns nor prays to the Heart of Christ.

The mind is the ruler of the soul. It should remain unstirred by agitations of the flesh—gentle and violent ones alike. Not mingling with them, but fencing itself off and keeping those feelings in their place. When they make their way into your thoughts, through the sympathetic link between mind and body, don't try to resist the sensation. The sensation is natural. But don't let the mind start in with judgments, calling it "good" or "bad.

My mind. What is it? What am I making of it? What am I using it for? Is it empty of thought? Isolated and torn loose from those around it? Melted into flesh and blended with it, so that it shares its urges?

If you ask a human being what makes his flesh creep more, a bat or a bomb, he will say the bat. It is difficult to experience loathing for something merely metal, however ominous. We save these sensations for those with skin and flesh: a skin, a flesh, unlike our own.

To mock at her form was an indirect accusation of her Creator, who framed her after the fashion He liked best, and gave her a mind that far excelled the transient endowments of perishable flesh.

Every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world. (1 John 4:3)

True conversion is the renouncing of the world, the flesh, and the devil; and it is at our peril that we lust after the things we have abandoned. As Matthew Henry (1662-1714) says, "Drawing back is to perdition, and looking back is towards it.

All by nature are essentially evil, nothing but "flesh"; everything in us is contrary to holiness.

Sing, my tongue, the Savior's glory,Of His Flesh the mystery sing;Of the Blood, all price exceeding,Shed by our immortal King.

When the Word, by the power of the Spirit, is heard, embraced, and enjoyed, we are strengthened to resist the flesh and to savor the Son.