Notable Quotable 114

Sep 28, 2023

Beauty tutors our compassion, making us more prone to love and to see the attraction of goodness. Art takes us out of our self-referentiality and invites us to see through the eyes of the other, whether that other is the artist herself or a character in a story. Because beauty endows goodness with mercy, it enables us to see how difficult it is to achieve goodness, how often one good exists in tension with another. Our pursuit of the good is inherently dramatic, and drama is based on conflict. Thus goodness without beauty is moralism, holier than thou... Beauty without goodness is frigid and lifeless. It can be pure virtuosity—form without meaning—but then it fails to touch the heart. We admire the acrobatics but fail to see the point.

- Gregory Wolfe

Of what avail is any amount of well-being, if at the same time, we steadily render the world more vulgar, uglier, noisier, and drearier and if we lose the moral and spiritual foundations of their existence? Man simply does not live by radio, automobiles, and refrigerators alone, but by the whole unpurchasable world beyond the market and turnover figures, the world of dignity, beauty, poetry, grace, chivalry, love, and friendship, the world of community, variety of life, freedom, and fullness of personality.

- Wilhelm Röpke

The world is miserable because men live beneath themselves; the error of modern man is that he wants to reform the world without having either the will or the power to reform man, and this flagrant contradiction, this attempt to make a better world on the basis of a worsened humanity, can only end in the very abolition of what is human, and therefore the abolition of happiness too. Reforming man means binding him again to Heaven, reestablishing the broken link; it means tearing him away from the reign of the passions, from the cult of matter, quantity, and cunning, and reintegrating him into the world of the spirit and serenity, we would even say: into the world of sufficient reason.

- Frithjof Schuon

And one of the truths that grow truer as a man’s experience accumulates is this very old one; that men need a religion primarily to prevent them from worshiping idols… You do not really get an empty space; you only get a new undergrowth of stunted trees when you lay low the cedars of Lebanon. Unless that part of the mind is satisfied by faith it will be satisfied by a fad; those who destroyed a church have only created a sect… The heir of a great religion is a small religion.

- G.K. Chesterton

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is the nature of the human being to seek a justification for his actions... Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches, curses, but will receive praise and honors.

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

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Politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder.

- Harry Patch, the last surviving soldier of World War I, 2007

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goeth

In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

A police state is a country run by criminals.

- Robert Harris

The State practices “violence,” the individual must not do so. The State’s behavior is violence, and it calls its violence “law” that of the individual “crime.”

- Max Stirner (1982). “The Ego and Its Own”, p.197, Rebel Press