"There were only two classes of people who heard the cry on Christmas night: shepherds, and wise men. Shepherds: those who know they know nothing. Wise men: those who know they do not know everything. Only the very simple and very learned discovered God -- never the man with one book.”

+Venerable Fulton Sheen

"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again."

~André Gide

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."

~G.K. Chesterton

"I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend."

~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

"People in those old times had convictions; we moderns only have opinions. And it needs more than a mere opinion to erect a Gothic cathedral."

~Heinrich Heine

"There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves... There is no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves... The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility... According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil." "Pride is the mother hen under which all other sins are hatched." "It is the complete anti-God state of mind."

"Pride always means enmity -- it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God." "For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense."

~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

"As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you."

"In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at all."

"That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God."

~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years... If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man."

~G. K. Chesterton

"If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed. It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed."

~Marcus Aurelius

“Thou art 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 à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”

+St. Augustine

'Sacred art is made as a vehicle for spiritual presences, it is made at one and the same time for God, for angels and for man; profane art on the other hand exists only for man and by that very fact betrays him.
Sacred art helps man to find his own center, that kernel whose nature is to love God' - Frithjof Schuon, Cathedral of Reims, France, 13th century

Old books help us rediscover the sensibilities once common to us all.

#LillaCabotPerry

"It is only by promoting the happiness of others, that we can secure our own."

"Only virtue and nature can make you happy."

~Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

"This joy in God is not like any pleasure found in physical or intellectual satisfaction. Nor is it such as a friend experiences in the presence of a friend. But, if we are to use any such analogy, it is more like the eye rejoicing in light."

+Saint Augustine of Hippo

"The thinker either conforms his desires to the truth, or he conforms truth to desire."

~E. Michael Jones

"Only yesterday I was no different than them, yet I was saved. I am explaining to you the way of life of a people who say every sort of wicked thing about me because I sacrificed their friendship to gain my own soul. I left the dark paths of their duplicity and turned my eyes toward the light where there is salvation, truth, and justice. They have exiled me now from their society, yet I am content. Mankind only exiles the one whose large spirit rebels against injustice and tyranny. He who does not prefer exile to servility is not free in the true and necessary sense of freedom."

~Kahlil Gibran

'Man, in this art, is no longer even a caricature of himself; he is no longer portrayed in the throes of spiritual death, ravaged by the hideous Nihilism of our century that attacks, not just the body and soul but the very idea of nature and man. No, all this has passed; the crisis is over; man is dead. The new art celebrates the birth of a new species, the creature of the lower depths, subhumanity' - Fr. Seraphim Rose, sculpture by Alberto Giacometti

“Even if there be no hereafter, I would live my time believing in a grand thing that ought to be true if it is not... If these be not truths, then is the loftiest part of our nature a waste. Let me hold by the better than the actual, and fall into nothingness off the same precipice with Jesus and John and Paul and a thousand more, who were lovely in their lives, and with their death make even the nothingness into which they have passed like the garden of the Lord. I will go further, and say, I would rather die for evermore believing as Jesus believed, than live for evermore believing as those that deny him.”

~George MacDonald