Till we have faces

Books, reading and quotes...

[cecilia37]

“Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.”

-Theodore Roosevelt

[dhaaruni]

This is very good

[itspileofgoodthings]

“Every once in a while you just have to decide to do something very crazy and very right–just to dare yourself to live. I don’t mean doing something stupid and destructive–just something fun and good and beautiful.”

— The Shadow of the Bear, Regina Doman (via thisiswearbythestars)

[larien-vardamir-arcamonel]

“Inhuman monsters do not really exist, except in fairy-tales”! There are plenty of inhuman monsters in the modern world; inhuman monsters control commerce and rule continents. The only real difference between fairy-tale and modern fact is this: that in fairy-tales the monsters are fought. That is one of the very many superiorities of fairy-tales.

–G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, February 3, 1906

[magpie-trove]

“I believe that at the center of the universe there dwells a loving spirit who longs for all that’s best in all of creation, a spirit who knows the great potential of each planet as well as each person, and little by little will love us into being more than we ever dreamed possible. That loving spirit would rather die than give up on any one of us.”

—Mr Rogers

[magpie-trove]

“There are others; the writers, painters, poets, musicians, philosophers and many other great men and women of courage who pursued their thoughts and ideas despite the great risk it brought to their lives. This is what Havel calls living in truth, and this is what the Communists understood so correctly as posing the greatest threat to their society of lies. What is amazing is the clarity with which the . . .totalitarian regimes recognize the power of beauty, truth and culture to topple seemingly impregnable tyrannies -- dictatorships which are backed up by armies, spy systems and a systematic and repressive violence quake with fear before a poem, a play, a symphony and short story. The power of truth is most powerful to those who are actively spinning lies.”

—Anna Halpurn

[cslewisthoughts]

One of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe—a mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death and disease, and sin. The difference is that Christianity thinks this Dark Power was created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong. Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel. Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say, landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery. I know someone will ask me, ‘Do you really mean, at this time of day, to reintroduce our old friend the devil—hoofs and horns and all?’ Well, what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and horns. But in other respects my answer is ‘Yes, I do.’ I do not claim to know anything about his personal appearance. If anybody really wants to know him better I would say to that person, ‘Don’t worry. If you really want to, you will. Whether you’ll like it when you do is another question.

Mere Christianity

[fosterfoundandroseblade]

“Politicians are of course an artificially privileged and protected class; more privileged and protected than any of the aristocracies of the past. An aristocrat sometimes had his head cut off by the public executioner, at the command of the public authority. A gentleman was sometimes run through the body by another gentleman, in an affair of private honour. As our politics make light alike of private honour and public authority, the politician is probably the first ruler in all history who runs no risks by the act of ruling.”

— G. K. Chesterton, New Witness, June 24 1921 (via the-last-crusade)

[francesderwent]

But is the comfortable doctrine…that we are all inevitably mild. We cannot be monsters of vice. We need not be monsters of virtue. And everyone loses sight of the true and terrible and inspiriting doctrine—the old doctrine that unless we strive every instant to be monsters of virtue, we ourselves may easily be monsters of vice. There is nothing nearer to us than madness; as every man knows who recalls some one moment of his life. “Inhuman monsters do not really exist, except in fairy-tales”! There are plenty of inhuman monsters in the modern world; inhuman monsters control commerce and rule continents. The only real difference between fairy-tale and modern fact is this: that in fairy-tales the monsters are fought. That is one of the very many superiorities of fairy-tales.

–G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, February 3, 1906

[eternal-echoes]

“Both capitalism and socialism are opposite sins against property. Capitalism emphasizes private rights to property without any social responsibility to the common good; socialism emphasizes the social use of property, to the forgetfulness of personal rights. The true solution is one in which the rights to property are personal, but the responsibility is social. A man is free on the inside because he can call his soul his own; he is free on the outside because he can call his property his own.”

— Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Crisis in History

[keepersofthegate]

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.

All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions.

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, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. 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. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

— C. S. Lewis, On The Reading of Old Books, introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation

C.S. Lewis On The Reading of Old Books | ReasonableTheology.org

In his introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation, C.S. Lewis advises us to take up the reading of old books rather than merely reading

[francesderwent]

But is the comfortable doctrine…that we are all inevitably mild. We cannot be monsters of vice. We need not be monsters of virtue. And everyone loses sight of the true and terrible and inspiriting doctrine—the old doctrine that unless we strive every instant to be monsters of virtue, we ourselves may easily be monsters of vice. There is nothing nearer to us than madness; as every man knows who recalls some one moment of his life. “Inhuman monsters do not really exist, except in fairy-tales”! There are plenty of inhuman monsters in the modern world; inhuman monsters control commerce and rule continents. The only real difference between fairy-tale and modern fact is this: that in fairy-tales the monsters are fought. That is one of the very many superiorities of fairy-tales.

–G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, February 3, 1906

[apesoformythoughts]

“The true secret and hope of human life is something much more dark and beautiful than it would be if suffering were a mark of sin. A mere scheme of rewards and punishments would be some thing much meaner and more mechanical than this exasperating and inspiring life of ours. An automatic scheme of ‘Karma’ or ‘reaping what we sow’ would be just as gross and material as sowing beans or reaping barley. It might satisfy mechanicians or monists or theosophists or cautious financiers, but not brave men. It is no paradox to say that the one thing that would make suffering intolerable would be the thought that it was systematically inflicted upon sinners. The one thing that would make our agony infamous would be the idea that it was deserved. On the other hand, the doctrine which makes it most endurable is exactly the opposite doctrine, that life is a battle in which the best put their bodies in the front, in which God sends only his holiest into the hail of the arrows of hell. In the book of Job is foreshadowed that better doctrine, full of a dark chivalry, that he that bore the worst that man can suffer was the best that bore the form of man.” 

— G.K. Chesterton 

[larien-vardamir-arcamonel]

The fear peculiar to man cannot be overcome by reason, but only by the presence of someone who loves him.

Pope Benedict XVI, “Difficulties with the Apostles’ Creed” in Fundamental Speeches from Five Decades (Ignatius, 2012)

[acircleoffourteen-deactivated20]

“If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”

— Julian of Norwich (via milkboydotnet)

[wedarkacademia]

“A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.”

― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

[virgin-martyr]

“each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen”

— Anne Sexton, excerpt from “Courage,” from The Awful Rowing Towards God