"Francis of Assisi" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... illustrate what must have happened to the Christian well-spring. He shows that even in the lifetime of its founder the Franciscan fraternity crystallised under the insensible but enormous pressure of the world, the flesh and (doubtless) the devil. Saint Francis of Assisi, for instance, taught literal poverty—abstinence from money, goods and books. His Franciscans wouldn't have it. They asked for money and took it. Not always directly, ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... hidden substantial sanctity compatible with the utmost latitudes of heterodoxy; a bedrock of devout gneiss or porphyry hidden under a mere alluvium of modern freethinking; a reality—if the truth were known—of St. Francis of Assisi behind a mask of Voltaire. Her hearer only half followed her reasoning, but that mattered little, as she was brimming with assent to anything Gwen advanced, with such beautiful and earnest eyes to ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... imagination of youthful minds. But it is not with Bible characters only that this book deals. The lives of Christian saints who entered upon their inheritance, such as Christopher and Sylvester and Francis of Assisi, also have their place, while yet more prominent are stories and poems based on some Bible incidents. Even selections such as Hawthorne's Great Stone Face or Wordsworth's Ode to Duty have their roots deep in the Bible, for they can be understood and explained only by those who know ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... her position as an advocate to take the hyperbolic words of Jesus in an occidental literalness. But Mrs. Hilbrough thought her most dangerous when she came to cite instances of almost inconceivable self-sacrifice from Christian biography. The story of Francis of Assisi defending himself against the complaint of his father by disrobing in the presence of the judge and returning into his father's hands the last thread of raiment bought with the father's money that he might free himself from the parental claim, was likely to excite a Platonic admiration ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston
... the country of the Loire. But it was in France also, in a very important sense, that the Renaissance had begun. French writers, who are fond of connecting the creations of Italian genius with a French origin, who tell us how Saint Francis of Assisi took not his name only, but all those notions of chivalry and romantic love which so deeply penetrated his thoughts, from a French source, how Boccaccio borrowed the outlines of his stories from the old French fabliaux, and how Dante himself ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... neither the repression nor the degradation, but transformation of the sex side of our nature. I will take as the supreme example of that transformation the figure of Christ Himself—Christ who had neither wife nor child—St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Theresa of Spain. Four of the greatest figures—One of them supreme—who were not "natural celibates" in the sense that implies that they did not have surging through them the divine impulse of creative love; for these are the greatest lovers the ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... a threat of servitude. He feels dimly that his true country is elsewhere, and that if he must settle anywhere it is in the house of his Heavenly Father. Inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.... "Restless are our hearts, O my God, until they rest in Thee." Long before St. Francis of Assisi, he practised the mystic rule: "As a stranger and a pilgrim." It is true that in his twentieth year he was very far from being a mystic. But he already felt that restlessness which made him cross the sea and roam Italy from Rome ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... from Humanitarianism. Christianity, like the fabled giant, Antaeus, has always drawn fresh strength for its battles from touching its feet to the ground in the Jesus of historic fact. It was so when Francis of Assisi recovered His figure in the Thirteenth Century, and when Luther rediscovered Him in the Sixteenth. There can be little doubt but that fresh spiritual forces are to be liberated, indeed are already at work, from this new contact with the Jesus ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... the wire screen before the great crucifix halfway up the mountain, and Silvia had given Claudio these blossoms. He had laid them away with his treasures and relics—the bit of muslin from the veil of Our Lady of Loretto, the almost invisible speck from the cord of St. Francis of Assisi and the little paper of the ashes of Blessed Joseph Labre. In those days he was the little priest and she the little nun, and their companions stood respectfully back for them. Now he was no more the priest, and she was up there ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... of the Third Minors of St. Francis of Assisi was in invention of the comprehensive mind of that truly great man, by which 'worldlings' were enabled to participate in the spiritual advantages of the Franciscan rule and discipline without neglect or suspension of their civic and family duties. But it was an institution too enlightened ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... church ornaments, altar candlesticks, lecterns, silk banners, cassocks and birettas, statuettes of the Virgin, crucifixes and rosaries. Paul stood before the window of one, reading the titles of the books which were also displayed there, Garden of the Soul, The Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi. A phrase arose before him; he did not seem to hear it but to see it dancing in smoky characters which partially obscured a large ivory crucifix: "To shatter at a blow the structure of the ages." He recalled that Cardinal Pescara had used those words. His mood was unrestful and his brain ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... variations in the emphasis laid on this virtue or on that, or in the conception of what constitutes this virtue or that, may yield ideals of character and of conduct which bear but a slight family resemblance. Imagine St. Francis of Assisi lowering his voice, slowing his step, and cultivating "high- mindedness," or striving to make himself a ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... saints of long ago and their little brothers the beasts have a gentle influence. The stories include that of Saint Bridget and the King's Wolf, Saint Fronto's Camels, Saint Rigobert's Dinner, and Saint Francis of Assisi. ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... social, political, religious, and commercial life, due to the German grip upon Europe. Dante, whose grandmother was a Goth, was not only a poet but a fighter for freedom, taking a leading part in the struggle of the Bianchi against the Neri and Pope Boniface, was born in 1265 and died in 1321; Francis of Assisi, born in 1182, not only represented a democratic influence in the church, but led the earliest revolt against the despotism of money; the movement to found cities and to league cities together for the furtherance of trade and industry, and thus to give rights to whole classes of people ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... and thinkers. Yet it is because they tell us what they have seen and touched, not what they have heard,—what they have lived and shown forth in acts that bear testimony to their words, that they have this power. Such were St. Augustine, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas a Kempis, and many a humbler name whose life's story has come into our hands; such were the Apostles, and, preeminently, Christ. It is the reality of the life in them, personal, direct, fundamental, that preserves ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... miracles was she not capable when acting according to the impulses of her own heart, and the grace of her own mind? From the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries God's servants perform wondrous works. Saint Dominic, possessed by holy wrath, exterminates heresy with fire and sword; Saint Francis of Assisi for the nonce founds poverty as an institution of society; Saint Antony of Padua defends merchants and artisans against the avarice and cruelty of nobles and bishops; Saint Catherine brings the Pope ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... wandered from place to place, preaching to the common people and dependent for their own living upon alms. These orders came into prominence in the thirteenth century and included, among others, the Franciscan, whose lovable founder Saint Francis of Assisi had urged humility and love of the poor as its distinguishing characteristics, and the Dominican, or Order of the Preachers, devoted by the precept of its practical founder, Saint Dominic, to missionary zeal. All the ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... do not believe a great prophet can be tender enough to persuade. That is why prophets are scorned or ignored by their generation. Gentleness is the absolute breath of music, which alone can penetrate the soul or even the material body of nature. The supreme gentleness of St. Francis of Assisi made the birds listen to his music, for his breath ran dancing in a cool breeze through all their singing stars. We need a St. Francis at present burningly. Is it possible to form a religious order of the poets? Here is an ideal. But it ...
— The Forgotten Threshold • Arthur Middleton
... are bound up with the creed, and if they are to be received with the same completeness as the laws of conscience, they rest, and must rest, either on the divine truth of Scripture, or on the divine witness in ourselves. On human evidence, the miracles of St. Teresa and St. Francis of Assisi are as well established as ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... "medical materialism finishes up St Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out St Teresa as an hysteric, St Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... of disease took a milder hysterical character, the subject of it was treated with reverence, and even elevated to sainthood: such examples as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Catherine of Siena in Italy, St. Bridget in Sweden, St. Theresa in Spain, St. Mary Alacoque in France, and Louise Lateau in Belgium, are typical. But more frequently such cases shocked public feeling, and were treated with especial ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... sacrifice of personal property. Maxwell tells me that so far no one has interpreted the spirit of Jesus in such a way as to abandon his earthly possessions, give away of his wealth, or in any literal way imitate the Christians of the order, for example, of St. Francis of Assisi. It was the unanimous consent, however, that if any disciple should feel that Jesus in his own particular case would do that, there could be only one answer to the question. Maxwell admitted that he was still to a certain degree uncertain as to Jesus' probable action ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... dot was called Bertran. He was a Frenchman, und he was a goot man—naturalist to the bone. Dey said he was an escaped convict, but he was a naturalist, und dot was enough for me. He would call all her life beasts from der forests, und dey would come. I said he was St. Francis of Assisi in a new dransmigration produced, und he laughed und said he had never preach to der fishes. He sold ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... after another of the pupils would fall asleep; the preceptor, suddenly interrupting himself, would continue after a short pause: "And now I will tell you of King Arthur," and all eyes would sparkle as the pupils listened with rapt attention. Francis of Assisi called one of his disciples "a knight of his Round Table," and three hundred years later Don Quixote lost his reason over the study of those legends; some of the finest works of art of the present time, Wagner's "Lohengrin," ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... long as the human intellect (to leave the human conscience out of the question) survives, men will be burdened with the sense of imperfection and think enviously of the nobility of Epaminondas or Julius Csar or St Francis of Assisi. For we have to count even Julius Csar among the virtuous, though the scandalmongers would not have it so. His vices may have made him bald and brought about his assassination. But he had the heroic virtues—courage ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... it possible?" exclaimed Narcisse: "a book like that with pages recalling the delightful St. Francis of Assisi!" And thereupon he obligingly placed himself at Pierre's disposal. "But our ambassador will be very useful to you," he said. "He is the best man in the world, of charming affability, and full of the old French ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... oppressive sense of the futility of the contemporary church, but this time it came in the most grotesque form. For hanging half out of the casement he was suddenly reminded of St. Francis of Assisi, and how at his rebuke the wheeling ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... Town in 1798 to become president of the college, he found living on Fayette (35th) Street, near by, three ladies belonging to the Order of Poor Clares. This order was founded in Assisi long ago by Sister Clare, a devoted friend of Saint Francis of Assisi, and is similar to the Franciscans. The three ladies were members of the French nobility who had been driven from their convent in France during the Revolution in 1793 and, coming to this country, had set up a little convent not far ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker |
