Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus, commonly known as St. Jerome, was a Latin Catholic priest, biblical translator and monastic leader, traditionally regarded as the most learned of the Latin Fathers. Famous Saint Jerome quotes will help you understand what a christian life is all about and make you discover new things about yourself, your life and your world.
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Top St. Jerome Quotes
Good, better, best. Never let it rest. ‘Til your good is better and your better is best. – Saint Jerome
Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ. – Saint Jerome
I am like the sick sheep that strays from the rest of the flock. Unless the Good Shepherd takes me on His shoulders and carries me back to His fold, my steps will falter, and in the very effort of rising, my feet will give way. – Saint Jerome
When we pray, we speak to God; but when we read, God speaks to us. – Saint Jerome
It is our part to seek, His to grant what we ask; ours to make a beginning, His to bring it to completion; ours to offer what we can, His to finish what we cannot. – Saint Jerome
For it is good to cleave to God, and to put our hopes in the Lord, so that, when we have exchanged this poor life for the kingdom of heaven, we may cry aloud: ‘Whom have I in heaven but thee? There is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.’ Assuredly, when we have found such wealth in heaven, we may well grieve to have sought after poor passing pleasures here on earth. – Saint Jerome
The Scriptures are shallow enough for a babe to come and drink without fear of drowning and deep enough for theologians to swim in without ever reaching the bottom. – Saint Jerome
The best advice I can give you is this. Church tradition – especially when they do not run counter to the Faith – are to be observed in the form in which previous generations have handed them down. – Saint Jerome
Make knowledge of the Scripture your love … Live with them, meditate on them, make them the sole object of your knowledge and inquiries. – Saint Jerome
The doer of evil has, indeed, killed his own soul; but the heretic — the liar — has killed as many souls as he has seduced. – Saint Jerome
A false interpretation of Scripture causes that the gospel of the Lord becomes the gospel of man, or, which is worse, of the devil. – Saint Jerome
The heretic is both a murderer and a practitioner of deceit. How is he deceitful? His words deliberately misrepresent the words of the Lord. – Saint Jerome
Be at peace with your own soul, then heaven and earth will be at peace with you. – Saint Jerome
Heretics do not have Christ, the Truth, on their lips, because they do not have him in their heart. – Saint Jerome
There are things in life that are bigger than ourselves. Life is short, live it well. – Saint Jerome
Heretics mean one thing in their heart; they promise another with their lips. They speak with piety and conceal impiety. They speak Christ and hide the Antichrist, for they know that they will never succeed with their seduction if they disclose the Antichrist. They present light only to conceal darkness; through light they lead to darkness. – Saint Jerome
Woman is the gate of the devil, the road to iniquity, the sting of the scorpion, in a word, a dangerous species. – Saint Jerome
Instead of speaking saintly words we must act them. – Saint Jerome
Be ever engaged, so that whenever the devil calls he may find you occupied. – Saint Jerome
Begin now what you will be hereafter. – Saint Jerome
A friend is long sought, hardly found, and with difficulty kept. – Saint Jerome
The friendship that can cease has never been real. – Saint Jerome
The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart. – Saint Jerome
Music to me is a voice, my voice, it’s my way of expressing what colours can I bring in, what emotions, what feel. What ideas can I bring out from these instruments that would make this song come alive. – Saint Jerome
It is worse still to be ignorant of your ignorance. – Saint Jerome
We must love Christ and always seek Christ’s embraces. Then everything difficult will seem easy. – Saint Jerome
If then you remain constant in faith in the face of trial, the Lord will give you peace and rest for a time in this world, and forever in the next. – Saint Jerome
So valuable to heaven is the dignity of the human soul that every member of the human race has a guardian angel from the moment the person begins to be. – Saint Jerome
The best advice that I can give you is this. Church-traditions — especially when they do not run counter to the faith — are to be observed in the form in which previous generations have handed them down; and the use of one church is not to be annulled because it is contrary to that of another. – Saint Jerome
The Church was founded upon Peter: although elsewhere the same is attributed to all the Apostles, and they all receive the keys of the kingdom of heaven, the strength of the Church depends upon them all alike, yet one among the twelve is chosen so that when a head has been appointed, there may be no occasion for schism. – Saint Jerome
Avoid, as you would the plague, a clergyman who is also a man of business. – Saint Jerome
Thank God I am deemed worthy to be hated by the world. – Saint Jerome
If Christ did not want to dismiss the Jews without food in the desert for fear that they would collapse on the way, it was to teach us that it is dangerous to try to get to heaven without the Bread of Heaven. – Saint Jerome
True friendship ought never to conceal what it thinks. – Saint Jerome
Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through your will a be general natural law. – Saint Jerome
Being over seventy is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as on a battlefield. – Saint Jerome
Love is not to be purchased, and affection has no price. – Saint Jerome
Marriage is good for those who are afraid to sleep alone at night. – Saint Jerome
What good is speed if the brain has oozed out on the way. – Saint Jerome
Catch, then, O catch the transient hour; Improve each moment as it flies! – Saint Jerome
Why do you not practice what you preach. – Saint Jerome
The scars of others should teach us caution. – Saint Jerome
Keep doing some kind of work, that the devil may always find you employed. – Saint Jerome
Let your daughter have first of all the book of Psalms for holiness of heart, and be instructed in the Proverbs of Solomon for her godly life. – Saint Jerome
They talk like angels but they live like men. – Saint Jerome
Having experienced the vexation of marriage, why should she be like the dog who returns to his own vomit, – Saint Jerome
Nothing gives us a greater idea of our soul, than that God has given us, at the moment of our birth, an angel to take care of it. – Saint Jerome
Among us, what is not allowed to women is equally not allowed to men. – Saint Jerome
Nothing is hard for lovers, no labor is difficult for those who wish it. – Saint Jerome
Malice swallows the greatest part of its own venom. – Saint Jerome
My speech is too fast; my oration confused; love knows no order. – Saint Jerome
The laws of Caesar are one thing, those of Christ, another. Papinianus judges one way, our Paul another. – Saint Jerome
It is no fault of Christianity that a hypocrite falls into sin. – Saint Jerome
[O]pulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessors. – Saint Jerome
It is easier to mend neglect than to quicken love. – Saint Jerome
I praise wedlock, I praise marital union, but only because they produce me virgins. – Saint Jerome
Everything must have in it a sharp seasoning of truth. – Saint Jerome
It is not being in Jerusalem, but living a good life there that is praiseworthy. – Saint Jerome
A man who is well grounded in the testimonies of the Scripture is the bulwark of the Church. – Saint Jerome
For all riches come from iniquity, and unless one were to lose another could not gain. Hence the common adage seems to me to be very true: The rich man is unjust or the heir of an unjust one. – Saint Jerome
Love knows nothing of order. – Saint Jerome
Marriage fills the Earth, virginity Heaven. – Saint Jerome
Virginity can be lost by a thought. – Saint Jerome
Quick enough, if good enough. – Saint Jerome
The truly miserable have a timbre in their voices strong enough to erase smiles from the faces and souls of the contented. – Saint Jerome
The most base of men can be civilized through suffering. – Saint Jerome
Neither Britain, a land fertile in tyrants, nor the people of Ireland, knew Moses and the prophets. – Saint Jerome
Early impressions are hard to eradicate from the mind. When once wool has been dyed purple, who can restore it to its previous whiteness? – Saint Jerome
Small minds can never handle great themes. – Saint Jerome
Sometimes the character of the mistress is inferred from the dress of her maids. – Saint Jerome
That clergyman soon becomes an object of contempt who being often asked out to dinner never refuses to go. – Saint Jerome
Playing keys is more than just knowing what notes to play. You have to know about the buttons too. – Saint Jerome
An ethic is not an ethic, and a value not a value without somesacrifice for it. Something given up, something not gained. – Saint Jerome
The enemy of reflection is the breakneck pace – the thousand pictures. – Saint Jerome
It is hard for the human soul not to love something, and our mind must of necessity be drawn to some kind of affection. – Saint Jerome
Time would fail me were I to try to lay before you in order all the passages in the Holy Scriptures which relate to the efficacy of baptism or to explain the mysterious doctrine of that second birth which though it is our second is yet our first in Christ. – Saint Jerome
If you call [the synagogue] a brothel, a den of vice, the devil’s refuge, Satan’s fortress, a place to deprave the soul, an abyss of every conceivable disaster or whatever else you will, you are still saying less than it deserves. – Saint Jerome
For the preservation of chastity, an empty and rumbling stomach and fevered lungs are indispensable. – Saint Jerome
Haste is of the Devil. – Saint Jerome
Do not marvel at the novelty of the thing, if a Virgin gives birth to God. – Saint Jerome
No one loves to tell of scandal except to him who loves to hear it. Learn, then, to rebuke and check the detracting tongue by showing that you do not listen to it with pleasure. – Saint Jerome
Matrimony is always a vice, all that can be done is to excuse it and sanctify it; therefore it was made a religious sacrament. – Saint Jerome
What cannot be changed cannot be blamed. – Saint Jerome
That rain is the best which falls steadily on the earth. A sudden and excessive downpour ruins the fields. – Saint Jerome
Even brute beasts and wandering birds do not fall into the same traps or nets twice. – Saint Jerome
It is idle to play the lyre for an ass. – Saint Jerome
If a soul is not clothed with the teachings of the Church he cannot merit to have Jesus seated in him. – Saint Jerome
Beauty when unadorned is adorned the most. – Saint Jerome
To read without writing is to sleep. – Saint Jerome
Failure is the inspiration of tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. – Saint Jerome
Keep always busy so that the devil will find you always engaged. – Saint Jerome
Wine is the first weapon that devils use in attacking the young – Saint Jerome
Whoever eats the Lamb outside this House is profane. – Saint Jerome
A vice in the heart is an idol on the altar. – Saint Jerome
We need more music that is passionate and meaningful and honest. – Saint Jerome
Strictly speaking, one should not even rightly compare virginity to marriage because you cannot make a comparison between two things if one is good and the other evil. – Saint Jerome
Let us learn upon earth those things which can call us to heaven. – Saint Jerome
Out of one hundred thousand sinners who continue in sin until death, scarcely one will be saved. – Saint Jerome
Martyrdom does not consist only in dying for one’s faith. Martyrdom also consists in serving God with love and purity of heart every day of one’s life – Saint Jerome
The Roman world is in collapse, but we do not bend our neck. – Saint Jerome
He is rich enough who does not want bread. – Saint Jerome
Every day we are changing, every day we are dying, and yet we fancy ourselves eternal. – Saint Jerome
To ignore Scripture is to ignore Christ. – Saint Jerome
Vanity is truly the motive power that moves humanity, and it is flattery that greases the wheels. – Saint Jerome
They please the world most, who please Christ least. – Saint Jerome
Honest speech does not seek secret places. – Saint Jerome
While truth is always bitter, pleasantness waits upon evildoing. – Saint Jerome
And as regards Adam and Eve we must maintain that before the fall they were virgins in Paradise: but after they sinned, and were cast out of Paradise, they were immediately married. – Saint Jerome
Athletes as a rule are stronger than their backers; yet the weaker presses the stronger to put forth all his efforts. – Saint Jerome
To saints their very slumber is a prayer. – Saint Jerome
No one cares to speak to an unwilling listener. An arrow never lodges in a stone: often it recoils upon the sender of it. – Saint Jerome
Either we must speak as we dress, or dress as we speak. Why do we profess one thing and display another? The tongue talks of chastity, but the whole body reveals impurity. – Saint Jerome
When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting. – Saint Jerome
Preferring to store her money in the stomachs of the needy rather than hide it in a purse. – Saint Jerome
Always be doing something worthwhile; then the devil will always find you busy. – Saint Jerome
A fat stomach never breeds fine thoughts. – Saint Jerome
Everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses. – Saint Jerome
The Church of Christ has been founded by shedding its own blood, not that of others; by enduring outrage, not by inflicting it. Persecutions have made it grow; martyrdoms have crowned it. – Saint Jerome
Shun, as you would the plague, a cleric who from being poor has become wealthy, or who, from being nobody has become a celebrity. – Saint Jerome
The eating of meat was unknown up to the big flood, but since the flood they have put the strings and stinking juices of animal meat into our mouths, just as they threw in front of the grumbling sensual people in the desert. Jesus Christ, who appeared when the time had been fulfilled, has again joined the end with the beginning, so that it is no longer allowed for us to eat animal meat. – Saint Jerome
No athlete is crowned but in the sweat of his brow. – Saint Jerome
If there is but little water in the stream, it is the fault, not of the channel, but of the source. – Saint Jerome
Endeavor to have always in your hand a pious book, that with this shield you may defend yourself against bad thoughts. – Saint Jerome
Even while living in the world, the heart of Mary was so filled with motherly tenderness and compassion for men that no-one ever suffered so much for their own pains, as Mary suffered for the pains of her children. – Saint Jerome
