Disposition

"We cannot avoid moodiness; but we may turn to account, as does the poet, the various dispositions of the mind, or give them form and shape, as the sculptor his marble."

"Your beauty should not be an external one, consisting of braided hair or the wearing of gold ornaments and dresses. Instead, it should be the inner disposition of the heart, consisting in the imperishable quality of a gentle and quiet spirit, which God values greatly."

"I hold virtue, in general, or the virtues severally, to be only in the disposition, each a feeling, not a principle."

"Not the observance of outer civil or statutory churchly duties but the pure moral disposition of the heart alone can make man well-pleasing to God. ... From a small beginning in the sharing and spreading of such dispositions, religion, like a grain of seed in good soil, or a ferment of goodness, would gradually, through its inner power, grow into a kingdom of God."

"To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions they demand, is to fall into superstition."

"In the “fulfilment” of both the laws and duty, ... the moral disposition ceases to be the universal, opposed to inclination, and inclination ceases to be particular, opposed to the law, and therefore this correspondence of law and inclination is life and, as the relation of differents to one another, love."