"Many of us long for the past because we believe, correctly, that the past uniquely offered something that satisfied a core human need—namely, the need for hope for something better and everlasting beyond this life, which communities steeped in religious tradition, in which faith formed the center of one’s life and permeated every aspect of it, were able to inspire. In short, this past provided the means by which man’s spiritual thirst could be quenched. The tragedy of the present condition consists not only in the fact that we are dying of this thirst, but also of our ignorance of the reason for—or even the fact of—our condition, as well as the truth that the cure lies within our own hearts, buried though it is beneath layers of selfish and worldly attachments."

~Dr. Amir Azarvan

"You should know that the Grace of God departs because of three things: pride, egotism and passions of the flesh."

~Gerondissa Makrina of Volos

"To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues."

~John Locke

"The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see the state transformed into an immense social machine, all the individual components of which are strictly limited to the performance of a definite and specialised function, where there could be no freedom because the machine could only work smoothly as long as every wheel and cog performed its task with unvarying regularity. Now the nearer modern society comes to the state of total organisation, the more difficult it is to find any place for spiritual freedom and personal responsibility. Education itself becomes an essential part of the machine, for the mind has to be as completely measured and controlled by the techniques of the scientific expert as the task which it is being trained to perform."

~Christopher Dawson

"We have the material conditions for world unity, but there is as yet no common moral order without which a true culture cannot exist. The entire modern world wears the same clothes, drives the same cars, and watches the same films, but it does not possess common ethical values or a sense of spiritual community or common religious beliefs. We have a long way ot go before such a spiritual community is conceivable, and meanwhile what we call modern civilization remains an area of conflict - a chaos of conflicting ideologies, institutions, and moral standards.[...] Every society rests in the last resort on the recognition of common principles and common ideals, and if it makes no moral or spiritual appeal to the loyalty of its members, it must inevitably fall to pieces."

~Christopher Dawson

“Unless men believe that they have an all-powerful ally outside time, they will inevitably abandon the ideal of a supernatural or anti-natural moral progress, and make the best of the world as they find it, conforming themselves to the law of self-interest and self-preservation which governs the rest of nature. And thus the philosophy of Progress, which had inspired such boundless hopes for the future of the human race, resulted in negation and disillusionment. The Cartesian Reason, which had entered so triumphantly on its career of explaining nature and man to itself by its own unaided power, ended in a kind of rational suicide by explaining itself away.”

~Christopher Dawson

"The universal hero myth always refers to a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, grip the audience with numinous emotions and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero."

~Carl Jung

"One could easily believe that philosophy or scientific knowledge is a maze that God built to trap and torture fools and punish our hubris."

"Exiled on earth as we are, unless we are able to content ourselves with that shadow of Paradise that is virgin nature, we must create for ourselves surroundings which by their truth and their beauty recall our heavenly origin and thereby also awaken our hope."

~Frithjof Schuon

"Meaning is disappearing from our lives. The amount of information being dumped on our heads is increasing exponentially. New technologies make primary sources more and more accessible, but this does not lead to an accumulation of knowledge. Not only has clarity not increased, but on the contrary, we understand the world around us less and less. This happens because the criteria of understanding have been lost, the instance in our consciousness, in our culture, in our society, which give life meaning, interprets reality, puts disparate facts into appropriate boxes, has disappeared. Westerners "killed God" according to Nietzsche, but along with him man himself disappeared as a reasonable, active being, as something vertical, capable of establishing clear guidelines and giving definite sense to the world. All they are left with is a meaningless mosaic of post-modernist culture, where the pathos of humanism has dried up and civilizational fatigue has accumulated, depriving life of meaning."

~A.G. Dugin

"The New Paganism, should it ever become universal, or over whatever districts or societies it may become general, will never be what the Old Paganism was. It will be other, because it will be a corruption. The Old Paganism was profoundly traditional; indeed, it had no roots except in tradition. Deep reverence for its own past and for the wisdom of its ancestry and pride therein were the very soul of the Old Paganism; that is why it formed so solid a foundation on which to build the Catholic Church, though that is also why it offered so long and determined a resistance to the growth of the Catholic Church. But the New Paganism has for its very essence contempt for tradition and contempt of ancestry. It respects perhaps nothing, but least of all does it respect the spirit of "Our fathers have told us."
The Old Paganism worshipped human things, but the noblest human things, particularly reason and the sense of beauty..."

"...In these it rose to heights greater than have since been reached, perhaps, and certainly to heights as great as were ever reached by mere reason or in the mere production of beauty during the Christian centuries.
But the New Paganism despises reason, and boasts that it is attacking beauty. It presents with pride music that is discordant, building that is repellent, pictures that are a mere chaos, and it ridicules the logical process, so that, as I have said, it has made of the very word "logical" a sort of sneer.
The Old Paganism was of a sort that would be open, when due time came, to the authority of the Catholic Church. It had ears which at least would hear and eyes which at least would see; but the New Paganism not only has closed its senses, but is atrophying them, so that it aims at a state in which there shall be no ears to hear and no eyes to see. The one was growing keener in its sight and its hearing..."

"...the other is declining towards a condition where the society it informs will be blind and deaf, even to the main natural pleasures of life and to temporal truths. It will be incapable of understanding what they are all about.
The Old Paganism had a strong sense of the supernatural. This sense was often turned to the wrong objects and always to insufficient objects, but it was keen and unfailing... The New Paganism delights in superficiality, and conceives that it is rid of the evil as well as the good in what it believes to have been superstitions and illusions.
There it is quite wrong, and upon that note I will end. Men do not live long without gods; but when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil. One might put it in a sentence, and say that the New Paganism, foolishly expecting satisfaction, will fall, before it knows where it is, into Satanism."

~Hilaire Belloc, The New Paganism

“There will come a time when it will be recognized that man does not live on horsepower and tools alone. There are also goods which he does not want to and cannot do without. And he will learn to economize, and he will not seek to win one thing, only to lose everything else with it. For if man had gained everything that could be gained with his technology, he would have come to the realization that life on the now disfigured earth—which has been made so excessively easy and simple—is actually no longer worth living; that we have indeed snatched everything that our planet had to give away, and in the process we have destroyed it, and thus ourselves, in this extractive work. Each one of us has to take care of his own part, so that the change may come before it is everywhere too late forever!”

~Paul Schultze-Naumburg

"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions."

"Opponents of Christianity will believe anything except Christianity."

~G.K. Chesterton

"Culture is a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically."

~Matthew Arnold

"Knowledge is given to us by faith, that is to say, by our participatory adherence to the presence of Him Who reveals Himself. Faith is therefore not a psychological attitude, a mere fidelity. It is an ontological relationship between man and God... This faculty is the personal existence of man, it is his nature made to assimilate itself to divine life – both mortified in their state of separation and death and vivified by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Faith as ontological participation included in a personal meeting is therefore the first condition for theological knowledge."

~Vladimir Lossky

"By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality and ostentation."

~Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Democracy is just a false idol – a mere catchword and illusion of inferior classes, visionaries and dying civilisations."

~H.P. Lovecraft