“A great man lays upon posterity the duty of understanding him.”
“From his agonies and exultations he emerged with a great charity towards men, and something nobler than humanism. The world with all its suffering and sinning mortals was God’s world, which He had created and redeemed, and he looked upon it with a patient kindness. Of such a creed as his, and of such a temperament, quietism could not be the fruit. He must be up and doing, for he was called upon to assist in the building of the City of God….A man all his days must be busy making his soul, and forcing the world to conform to the heavenly will.”—John Buchan, Oliver Cromwell
“Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves.”
“I do not know in advance what love of others means on the basis of the general idea of love that grows out of my human desires—all this may rather be hatred and an insidious kind of selfishness in the eyes of Christ. What love is, only Christ tells us in his Word.”
“For the mature Christian, every Scripture reading will be “too long” even the shortest one. What does this mean? The Scripture is a whole and every word, every sentence possesses such multiple relationships with the whole that it is impossible always to keep the whole in view while listening to details. It becomes apparent, therefore, that the whole of the Scriptures (and hence every passage in it as well) far surpasses our understanding.”
“Where the heart is not singing there is no melody: there is only the dreadful medley of human praise.”
“Many people seek fellowship because they are afraid to be alone. Because they cannot stand loneliness, they are driven to seek the company of other people. There are Christians, too, who cannot endure being alone, who have had some bad experience with themselves, who hope they will gain some help in association with others. They are generally disappointed. They blame the fellowship for what is really their own fault. The Christian community is not a spiritual sanatorium. The person who comes into a fellowship because he is running away from himself is misusing it for the sake of diversion, not matter how spiritual this diversion may appear. He is not really seeking community at all, but only distraction which will allow him to forget his loneliness for a brief time, the very alienation that creates the deadly isolation of man. The disintegration of communication and all genuine experience, and finally resignation and spiritual death are the result of such attempts to find a cure.”
“He who denies his neighbor the service of praying for him denies him the service of a Christian.”
“Often we combat our evil thoughts most effectively if we refuse to allow them to be expressed in words.”
“The merely pious fellowship permits no one to be a sinner.”
“The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is. Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of men. And so it does not know that man is destroyed only by sin and can be healed only by forgiveness…In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner.”—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
“Footnotes often lead to despair.”—Cole Jeffery, Disputatio 4/14/23
“But there is no longer any room for a ghetto in the modern secular state. Both its tolerance and its intolerance are hostile to the existence of any such closed world. Under modern conditions the sectarian solution merely means that the religious minority abdicates its claim to influence the culture of the community.”
“Until a man acquires some knowledge of another culture, he cannot be said to be educated, since his whole outlook is so conditioned by his own social environment that he does not realize its limitations. He is provincial in time, if not in place, and he almost inevitably tends to accept the standards and values of his own society as absolute.”
“[Modern] educated people who are relatively well-informed in history and literature and art are often astonishingly ignorant about the religion to which they profess to belong.”
“Now it is not the business of Christianity to defend our secularized Western culture from the menace of social or political revolution. From the Christian point of view there is not much to choose between passive agnosticism or indifferentism and active materialism. In fact, both of them may be different symptoms or phases of the same spiritual disease. What is vital is to recover the moral and spiritual foundations on which the lives of both the individual and culture depend: to bring home to the average man that religion is not a pious fiction which has nothing to do with the facts of life, but that it is concerned with realities, that it is in fact the pathway to reality and the law of life. This is no easy task, since a completely secularized culture is a world of make-believe in which the figures of the cinema and the cartoon-strip appear more real than the figures of the Gospel; in which the artificial cycle of wage-earning and spending has divorced men from their direct contact with the life of the earth and its natural cycle of labor and harvest; and in which even birth and death and sickness and poverty no longer bring men face to face with ultimate realities, but only bring them into closer dependence on the state and its bureaucracy—so that every human need can be met by filling in the appropriate form."
“A Christian culture is a culture which is orientated to supernatural ends and spiritual reality, just as a secularized culture is one which is orientated to material reality and to the satisfaction of man’s material needs.”
“Christianity, on the other hand, offers no immediate panacea for the complex malady of the modern world. It has eternity before it, and it can afford to take its time.”
“According to the old American system, the state or states were concerned with the preservation of law and order and national independence. Everything else—religion, education, and economic life—was the sphere of free individual action in which the state had no voice. All this has been changed…the State, that unitary authoritative bureaucratic power, against which the American Revolution was a protest, has returned armed with new powers of supervision and psychological control of which George III never dreamed, while technology has unified the economic life of the nation into a vast system of organization in which every individual has his allotted place.”
“For the moral order and the technological order have become out of gear with one another, and as the technological order has advanced and become stronger, the moral order has grown weaker. The technological order lends itself most easily to the service of the “will to power” which, as Nietzsche saw, is a fundamentally amoral power, destructive of moral values. It resembles those jinn of whom we read in the Arabian Nights that were ready to do anything, good or bad, in the service of any man who possessed the word of power or the talisman.”—Christopher Dawson, The Crisis of Western Education
“Tomorrow is the devil’s day, but today is God’s.”
“Be wise in your youth. Write the word “poison” on all earthly pleasures. The most lawful of them must be used in moderation. All of them are soul-destroying if you give them your heart.”
“Be very sure of this—people never reject the Bible because they cannot understand it. They understand it too well; they understand that it condemns their own behavior; they understand that it witnesses against their own sins, and summons them to judgement. They try to believe it is false and useless, because they don’t like to believe it is true…Men question the truth of Christianity because they hate the practice of it.”
“[Your wife] will either be wings or handcuffs, and encouragement or hindrance to your Christianity, according to her character.”—J.C. Ryle, Thoughts for Young Men
"Georges, mon vieux," he broke silence, "do you believe in spirits, ghosts, devils?"
"I firmly believe in whiskey, the ghost of a salary, and a devil of a thin time. Seen 'em myself," was the reply.
"Because the only solution my Sergeant-Major could offer to the mystery was just that...."—P.C. Wren, Beau Geste
“Christianity is strange: it requires human beings to recognize that they are vile and even abominable, and requires them to want to be like God. Without such a counterweight this elevation would make them execrably vain, or this abasement execrably despicable.”—Pascal, Pensees
“For not only is Fortune blind herself, but as a rule she even blinds those whom she has embraced; and thus they are generally transported beyond themselves by wanton pride and obstinacy.”
“Scipio used to complain that men were more painstaking in all other things than in friendship; that everybody could tell how many goats and sheep he had, but was unable to tell the number of his friends; and that men took pains in getting the former, but were careless in choosing the latter, and had no certain signs or marks by which to determine their fitness for friendship.”
“Amicus certus in re incerta cernitur”—Ennius (in Cicero, De Amicitia)
“But everyone loves himself, not with a view of acquiring some profit for himself from his self-love, but because he is dear to himself on his own account; and unless this same feeling were transferred to friendship, the real friend would never be found; for he is, as it were, a second self.”
“Flattery, the handmaid of vice”—Cicero, De Amicitia
“The more patterns one examines, the greater advantage to one’s eloquence. You should not imitate one man, however distinguished: for an imitator never comes up to the level of his model. This is the way it is; the copy always falls short of the reality.”—Seneca the Elder, Controversia
