Notable Quotable 385

May 12, 2025

Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (for those who know how to read it), a picture, and a harmonious whole.

- Novalis

The study of the past is an exercise in humility; while the smug are nervously trammeled up in their self-opinion, the humble are free to rejoice in what is genuinely great or noble or beautiful. The adulator of the new must believe that a great oblong in brick and glass and steel marks an ‘advance’ in every respect from Chartres or Notre Dame de Paris, but the humble student of history has no stake in that game. He is free to wonder at the glory that a supposedly benighted people could accomplish—and then free to wonder where the real artistic darkness is to be found, then or now.

- Anthony Esolen

It is the simple things of life that make living worthwhile, the sweet fundamental things such as love and duty, work and rest, and living close to nature.

- Laura Ingalls Wilder

Civilized individuals are not the result of a civilization but it's cause.

- Nicolás Gómez Dávila

The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers & cities; but to know someone who thinks & feels with us, & who, though distant, is close to us in spirit, this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Strike.Me

Buy Me a Coffee

And those of us who have seen all the normal rules and relations of humanity uprooted by random speculators, as if they were, abnormal abuses and almost accidents, will understand why men have sought for something divine if they wished to preserve anything human. They will know why common sense, cast out from some academy of fads and fashions conducted on the lines of a luxurious madhouse, has age after age sought refuge in the high sanity of a sacrament.

- G.K. Chesterton

In all of Europe, in the whole world, political power is at the service of high finance and banking, it submits to the abject impositions of thieves and fraudsters working together in legal consortium. Not even in the worst times of barbarism and slave trade were human beings trafficked with such cold cruelty. Nations are put on the market. Public life exists only as a filthy commerce practiced within the confines of sterile institutions and hollow laws.

- Gabriele D’Annunzio

No one's ever been able to show me any difference between democracy and brute force. It's just a majority ganging up on a minority with the minority giving in to avoid getting massacred.

- L. Neil Smith

We need radical thinking, creative ideas, and imagination.

- Mairead Corrigan

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