Notable Quotable #34

Nov 12, 2022

To develop a complete mind: study the science of art; study the art of science.

Learn to see, realise that everything connects to everything else.

- Leonardo Di Vinci

"Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage."

Galatians 5:1

"Is progress real? We frolic in our emancipation from theology, but have we developed a natural ethic–a moral code independent of religion–strong enough to keep our instincts of acquisition, pugnacity, and sex from debasing our civilization into a mire of greed, crime, and promiscuity? Have we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred it from religious to national, ideological, or racial hostilities? Are our manners better than before, or worse?... Have our laws offered the criminal too much protection against society and the state? Have we given ourselves more freedom than our intelligence can digest? Or are we nearing such moral and social disorder that frightened parents will run back to Mother Church and beg her to discipline their children, at whatever cost to intellectual liberty? Has all the progress of philosophy since Descartes been a mistake through its failure to recognize the role of myth in the consolation and control of man?"

- Will Durant

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

- 1 Peter 5:8

You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I'd like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There's only an up or down - [up] man's old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course."

- Ronald Reagan

If there are no dogs in Heaven, then when I die I want to go where they went.

- Will Rogers

"It's not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a god-made Man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest daydrudge kindles into a hero."

- Thomas Carlyle

“Do we cast blame on him [God] because we were not made gods from the beginning, but were at first created merely as men, and then later as gods? Although God has adopted this course out of his pure benevolence, that no one may charge him with discrimination or stinginess, he declares, “I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are sons of the Most High.”… For it was necessary at first that nature be exhibited, then after that what was mortal would be conquered and swallowed up in immortality."

- Saint Irenaeus

“Yea, I say, the Word of God became a man so that you might learn from a man how to become a god… if one knows himself, he will know God, and knowing God will become like God... His is beauty, true beauty, for it is God, and that man becomes a god, since God wills it. So Heraclitus was right when he said, ‘Men are gods, and gods are men'… he who obeys the Lord and follows the prophecy given through him… becomes a god while still moving about in the flesh."

- Clement of Alexandria

Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society.

- Niccolo Machiavelli

To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days.

- Plutarch