Notable Quotable 388

Jun 23, 2025

And one of the truths that grow truer as a man’s experience accumulates is this very old one; that men need a religion primarily to prevent them from worshiping idols… You do not really get an empty space; you only get a new undergrowth of stunted trees when you lay low the cedars of Lebanon. Unless that part of the mind is satisfied by faith it will be satisfied by a fad; those who destroyed a church have only created a sect… The heir of a great religion is a small religion.

- G.K. Chesterton

As Orwell so succinctly put it, ‘The farther a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.' Man has drifted far, indeed. There is simply no place for the hard, objective truth in this world, and for those who insist upon speaking it regardless, little—if any—grace is afforded. In man’s abundance of sinful pride, he has come to believe himself to be infallible in thought and deed. To be proven wrong is to therefore be proven imperfect, thus contradicting his perceived infallibility. For this reason, every topic on the table of public discourse seems to lead not to rational, intentional, and thoughtful discourse, but rather to virulent, vitriolic, and hostile aggression. We walk on eggshells in our Lord of the Flies society, lest we step out of line and end up with our heads on pikes.

- Jeremy Kee

It is only when we become conscious of our part in life, however modest, that we shall be happy. Only then will we be able to live in peace and die in peace, for only this lends meaning to life and to death. Death is sweet when it comes in its time and in its place, when it is part of the order of things, when the old peasant of Provence, at the end of his reign, remits into the hands of his sons his parcel of goats and olive- trees in order that they in their turn transmit them to their sons. When one is part of a peasant lineage, one’s death is only half a death. Each life in turn bursts like a pod and sends forth its seed.

- Antoine de Saint Exupéry

We are all children of one great mother, Nature.

- Charles Dickens

The divine plane is one of Freedom. The inherent nature of man is ever seeking to express itself in terms of freedom, because freedom is the birthright of every living soul.

- Ernest Holmes

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Culture is the activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.

- Alfred North Whitehead

My pawing over the ancients and semi-ancients has been one struggle to find out what has been done, once and for all, better than it can ever be done again, and to find out what remains for us to do, and plenty does remain, for if we still feel the same emotions as those who launched a thousand ships, it is quite certain that we came on these feelings differently, through different nuances, by different intellectual gradations. Each age has its own abounding gifts yet only some ages transmute them into matters of duration.

- Ezra Pound

Who has ever seen ‘the individual’, if not defined by his family, his region, his profession, his language, his inheritance, his faith?

- Juan Vázquez de Mella

The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments.

- Ludwig von Mises

It's a sad state of affairs when you get used to the sight of blood, glorifying aggression as bravehearted. It's a sad state of affairs when you feel good dressing up for gala, while children are being bombed to death.

- Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets