Notable Quotable #41

Dec 12, 2022

The individual had always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe.

To be your own man is hard business. But no price is too high to pay for the privilage of owning yourself.

- Rudyard Kipling

All that I have learned has led me step-by-step to an unshakeable conviction of the existence of God.

I only believe what I know, and that eliminates believing. Therefore, I do not take His existence on belief - I know He exists.

- Carl Jung

"Wherever something is wrong, something is too big. If the stars in the sky or the atoms of uranium disintegrate in spontaneous explosion, it is not because their substance has lost its balance. It is because matter has attempted to expand beyond the impassable barriers set to every accumulation. Their mass has become too big. If the human body becomes diseased, it is, as in cancer, because a cell, or a group of cells, has begun to outgrow its allotted narrow limits. And if the body of a people becomes diseased with the fever of aggression, brutality, collectivism, or massive idiocy, it is not because it has fallen victim to bad leadership or mental derangement. It is because human beings, so charming as individuals or in small aggregations, have been welded into overconcentrated social units such as mobs, unions, cartels, or great powers."

~Leopold Kohr

We should keep the dead before our eyes, and honour them as though still living.

- Confucious

Freedom always exists. You only have to pay the price.

- Henry de Montherlant

If you are not prepared to use force to defend civilisation, then be prepared to accept barbarism.

- Thomas Sowell

Through beauty, art cleans the world of our self-obsession.

- Roger Scruton

Hierarchies are celestial. In Hell all are equal.

- Nicolás Gómez Dávila

“Take away religion, take away philosophy, take away the higher aims of art, and you deprive ordinary people of the ways in which they can represent their apartness. Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down’, which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness.”

- Roger Scruton

Thou are called to endure and to labour, not to a life of ease and trifling talk. Here therefore are men tried as gold in the furnace.

- Thomas á Kempis

If you celebrate your sexuality but not your fertility, you are cheating yourself of something your ancestors held in awe.

- Alice Teller