"If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we should know better where we are, for we should then take for certain the opposite of what the liar tells us. But the reverse of truth has a thousand shapes and a boundless field."

~Montaigne

"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."

~G.K. Chesterton

"When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy."

~T.S. Eliot

"Children are not a distraction from the most important work. They are the most important work."

~C.S. Lewis

"When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard 'having children' as a question of pro's and con's, the great turning point has come."

~Oswald Spengler

"Where you arrive does not matter as much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there."

~Seneca

"But my sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in Him but in myself and His other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error."

+Saint Augustine, The Confessions

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?"

~Cicero

"The past refuses to be dismissed, for it is the voice of all human wisdom."

~Russell Kirk

"The essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called 'self-realization'; but by denial, by suffering."

"The birth, death, and resurrection of Christ means that one day everything sad will come untrue."

~J.R.R. Tolkien

"Moderns seek change; tradition sought permanence."

“Traditions are answers that have been discovered to enduring questions.”

~Sir Roger Scruton

"What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything."

~H.P. Lovecraft

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine master grant that I may
Not so much seek to be consoled as to console
To be understood, as to understand
To be loved, as to love
For it's in giving that we receive
And it's in pardoning that we are pardoned
And it's in dying that we are born
To eternal life.

+Prayer of Saint Francis

“Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery (corporate mass media) that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed."

~Oswald Spengler

"The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of a democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitudes."

~Aldous Huxley

"Christian and coward, Saint and deserter, are words as much opposed as heaven and hell."

~Charles Spurgeon

"The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.“

"When the evil thing besieging us do appear, they do not appear outside but inside."

~G.K. Chesterton

"We are witnessing, not the natural end of a great human civilization, but the birth of a inhuman civilization that could never have come into being without a vast, an immense, a universal sterilisation of life's highest values."

~George Bernanos

Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful;
for beauty is God’s handwriting—a wayside sacrament.
Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower,
and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. / Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. / Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature. / Attractive because it promises true good.”

~Blaise Pascal, The Pensées

“The higher we soar in contemplation, the more limited become our expressions of that which is purely intelligible; even as now, when plunging into the Darkness which is above the intellect, we pass not merely into brevity of speech, but even into absolute silence, of thoughts as well as of words... and, according to the degree of transcendence, so our speech is restrained until, the entire ascent being accomplished, we become wholly voiceless, inasmuch as we are absorbed in Him who is totally ineffable.”

~Dionysius the Areopagite

"By habitually thinking of the presence of God, we succeed in praying twenty-four hours a day. The continual remembrance of the presence of God engenders in the soul a divine state."

+St. Paul of the Cross

"How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt."

~Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory