Thomas Cahill

"Human beings never know more than a part, as "through a glass darkly"; and all knowledge comes to us in pieces."

"Never interested in impressive edifices, Irish monks preferred to spend their time in study, prayer, farming—and, of course, copying. ...a little hut for each monk... a refectory and kitchen; a script…"

"Like fish who do not know they swim in water, we are seldom aware of the atmosphere of the times through which we move, how strange and singular they are. But when we approach another age, its alienne…"

"For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life."

"Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed."

"The Irish... developed a form of confession that was exclusively private and that had no equivalent on the continent. In the ancient church, confession of one's sins—and the subsequent penance... had …"

"The philosophy of self-denial also taught the brotherhood of man, based on the Stoical belief that every human being without distinction possesses a spark of divinity that is in communion with God, wh…"

"Just as the Judeo-Christian world had learned the Greek language and internalized Greek categories, the Greco-Roman world gradually abandoned its dying gods and became monotheistic."