Notable Quotable 304

Jun 28, 2024

Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.

- Plotinus, ‘The Enneads’

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In place of a true-type people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman...

- Oswald Spengler, 'The Decline of the West'

Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.

- Erich Fromm

A day without laughter is a day wasted.

- Nicolas Chamfort

Strike.Me

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You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

- G. K. Chesterton

Tradition speaks to each man the language he can comprehend, provided he wishes to listen.

- Frithjof Schuon

The quest for community will not be denied, for it springs from some of the powerful needs of human nature—needs for a clear sense of cultural purpose, membership, status, and continuity.

- Robert Nisbet

Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:

1. "Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;

2. Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;

3. Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;

4. Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;

5. Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;

6. Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do."

- Marcus Tullius Cicero