Notable Quotable #37

Nov 24, 2022

Those who are still standing upright in this decaying world of ruins exist at a higher level; their watchword is Tradition.

- Julius Evola

"In the post-Christian landscape of the 20th century, some who seek to transcend the bounds of humanity are left with nothing to idolise but themselves. Nature abhors a vacuum. In the absence of God and gods alike, an increasing number of militantly atheist world leaders had little left to venerate. Aggressively embedding a new, secular, cult of personality into the fabric of constitutions and ordinary lives can divorce their people from religious piety and into a new devotion of the individual."

~Katherine Bayford

Life is identity, definiteness, form, order, hierarchy and limits. Those who would affirm life must affirm all these things.

- Collins Claery

The material world, as conceived by materialists, however, is continually confused with reality as such.

- William A. Dembski

“Man must see things according to the spirit of the Creator, not with the superficial, profane and desacralizing view of the vulgar soul. The noble man feels the need to admire, to venerate, to worship; the vile man on the contrary tends to belittle, even to mock, which is the way the devil sees things; but it is also diabolical to admire what is evil, whereas it is normal and praiseworthy to despise evil as such, for the truth has precedence over everything... The definition of man according to immortality has precedence over the definition of man according to earthly life. The noble man respects, admires and loves in virtue of an essence that he perceives, whereas the vile man underestimates or scorns in virtue of an accident; the sense of the sacred is opposed to the instinct to belittle; the Bible speaks of ‘mockers.’ The sense of the sacred is the essence of all legitimate respect."

~Frithjof Schuon

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

- Henry David Thoreau

In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and "finding himself". If he persists on shifting his responsibly to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.

- Thomas Carlyle

"We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for & died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born."

~Roger Scruton

"Tradition is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”

~G.K. Chesterton

Let us not be pallbearers of the past. Let us utilise, by living, the qualities of the dead. Truth is ever new.

- A.G. Sertillanges