Notable Quotable 387

Jun 02, 2025

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

- C.S. Lewis

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Nature is an infinite sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

- Blaise Pascal

This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow as night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.

- William Shakespeare

The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

- Zeno

Strike.Me

Buy Me a Coffee

The big, blazing, terrible truth about man is that he has a heaven-sized hole in his heart, and nothing else can fill it. We pass our lives trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles.

- Peter Kreeft

There is no fulfillment of man’s true vocation in the order of nature. Man was made for more truth than he can see with his own unaided intelligence, and for more love than his will alone can achieve and for a higher moral activity than human prudence ever planned.

- Thomas Merton

Today, human civilization is drowning in a sea of lies.

- L. Neil Smith

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels ... upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

- Mario Savio, 'Operation of the Machine'

All your life, you will be faced with a choice. You can choose love or hate…

I choose

love.

- Johnny Cash