Thomas Cahill Quotes

#1. There are no mental health services offered to Death Row inmates. For whatever healing is done they themselves must be the healers.

Thomas Cahill

#2. If the Aeneid is language as metaphor, as the sacramental ritualizing of human experience, Cicero's speeches are language as practical tool.

Thomas Cahill

#3. The consulships were not the only ornamental offices in Roman society: the Eternal City was filled with the comings and goings of impotent men - senators, magistrates, bustling administrators of all kinds - performing meaningless duties.

Thomas Cahill

#4. To the Greek mind, the unwillingness to compromise in religious matters - which were not all that important, anyway - was impious, unpatriotic, maybe even seditious. For the Jews, religion was the Way of Life; it had nothing in common with the empty rituals of the Greeks.

Thomas Cahill

#5. which had previously provided the translator safe haven. Pretending

Thomas Cahill

#6. The Irish believed that gods, druids, poets, and others in touch with the magical world could be literal shape-shifters

Thomas Cahill

#7. However much he, as a reflective adult, modified her attitudes and diluted her prejudices, much of his instinctive outlook was formed by this fierce, unbending woman, so that in many ways Jesus's worldview is already spelled out in the Magnificat, the

Thomas Cahill

#8. How real is history? Is it just an enormous soup so full of disparate ingredients that it is uncharacterizable?

Thomas Cahill

#9. Well, they may not be civilized, but they certainly are confident - and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.

Thomas Cahill

#10. Despairing Dido, queen of ancient Carthage, slain by her own hand as her magnificent lover Aeneas lifts anchor and sails away forever: this is one of the most haunting and permanent images of the classical world.

Thomas Cahill

#11. (The festival) was awfully impersonal and abstract and there was something really gloomy about it, ... That's when I first started thinking about the typical view of reality.

Thomas Cahill

#12. We need not fear God as we fear all other suffering, which burns and maims and kills. For God's fire, though it will perfect us, will not destroy, for 'the bush was not consumed.

Thomas Cahill

#13. If there are no books. There is no civilization.

Thomas Cahill

#14. Appreciated. In any case, Satan, the Archdevil and ruler of Hell, looms

Thomas Cahill

#15. The Irish innovation was to make all confession a completely private affair between penitent and priest - and to make it as repeatable as necessary. (In fact, repetition was encouraged on the theory that, oh well, everyone pretty much sinned just about all the time.)

Thomas Cahill

#16. Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent.

Thomas Cahill