Saints
From Wikiquote
Oh lord I want to be in that number,
When the saints go marching in!
A Saint is an individual of exceptional holiness. The term originates within Christianity as one which has various definitions varying by denomination. The word itself means “holy” and is derived from the Latin sanctus which was the word used in translating hagios (άγιος meaning “holy” or “holy one”) in early Greek Christian literature and in the New Testament, where it is used to describe the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. This page is for quotes referring generally to saints and concepts of sainthood.
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- Alphabetized by author
- Some say this world of trouble
Is the only one we need
But I’m waiting for that morning
When the new world is revealed.Oh when the saints go marching in,
When the saints go marching in,
Oh lord I want to be in that number,
When the saints go marching in!- Anonymous author of the folk song "When the Saints Go Marching In"; as rendered in one of Louis Armstrong's versions of the traditional funeral march and jazz standard.
- Variant: Oh, when the saints go marching in
Lord, how I want to be in that number
When the saints go marching in.
- A saint, whether Buddhist or Christian, who knows his business as a saint is rightly meditative and in proportion to the rightness of his meditation is the depth of his peace. We have it on an authority which Mr. Chesterton is bound to respect that the kingdom of heaven is within us. … Failing like many others to discriminate between romanticism and religion, Mr. Chesterton has managed to misrepresent both Buddhism and Christianity. The truth is, that though Christianity from the start was more emotional in its temper than Buddhism, and though an element of nostalgia entered into it from an early period, it is at one in its final emphasis with the older religion. In both faiths the emphasis is on the peace that passeth understanding.
- Irving Babbitt, in response to comments in Orthodoxy (1908) by G. K. Chesterton, in "Buddha and the Occident", his afterword to his translation of the Dhammapada (1936), p. 99
- When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a Communist.
- Dom Helder Camara, Brazilian archbishop, as quoted in Peace Behind Bars : A Peacemaking Priest's Journal from Jail (1995) by John Dear, p. 65; this is a translation of "Quando dou comida aos pobres chamam-me de santo. Quando pergunto por que eles são pobres chamam-me de comunista."
- Variant translations:
- When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why are they poor, they call me a Communist.
- When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.
- No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards. If we follow that clue steadily we shall find some interesting things.
- G. K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy (1908)
- What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
- Leonard Cohen in Beautiful Losers (1966)
- Let us never forget that if we wish to die like the Saints we must live like them. Let us force ourselves to imitate their virtues, in particular humility and charity.
- Saint Theodore Guerin (Saint Mother Theodore), Letter to Sisters at Saint Mary's, 1848
