"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

“The greatest danger in the modern world is the attack on man as the image of God. That God became man in order to unite man to God is the only sure Divine underwriting of human worth."

~Archbishop Dmitri of Dallas

"There are only two possible forms of control: one internal and the other external; religious control and political control. They are of such a nature that when the religious barometer rises, the barometer of external political control falls and likewise, when the religious barometer falls, the political barometer, that is political control and tyranny, rises. That is the law of humanity, a law of history. If civilized man falls into disbelief and immorality, the way is prepared for some gigantic and colossal tyrant, universal and immense."

~Juan Donoso Cortes

"The key to education is the experience of beauty."

~Friedrich Schiller

"To be a reactionary is to understand that man is a problem without a human solution."

~Nicolás Gómez Dávila

#Goethe #noble #order

"We need to be close to one another in Christian love, or worldly forces would isolate us and have us believe that we are alone and dependant upon secular forces, which would make us slaves to their godless and murderous agenda."

~Cardinal Burke

“An honest man falls in love with an honest woman; he wishes, therefore to marry her, to be the father of her children, to secure her and himself. All systems of government should be tested by whether he can do this. If any system—feudal, servile, or barbaric—does, in fact, give him so large a cabbagefield that he can do it, there is the essence of liberty and justice. If any system—Republican, mercantile, or Eugenist—does, in fact, give him so small a salary that he can't do it, there is the essence of eternal tyranny and shame.”

"The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man does for himself and by himself."

~G.K. Chesterton

"The process of secularisation arises not from the loss of faith but from the loss of social interest in the world of faith. It begins the moment men feel that religion is irrelevant to the common way of life and that society as such has nothing to do with the truths of faith."

~Christopher Dawson

"Not by force of arms are civilizations held together, but by subtle threads of moral and intellectual principle.”

~Russel Kirk

"For if we will think of it, no Time need have gone to ruin, could it have found a man great enough, a man wise and good enough: wisdom to discern truly what the Time wanted, valor to lead it on the right road thither; these are the salvation of any Time. But I liken common languid Times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;—all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning. His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own... In all epochs of the world's history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his epoch;—the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt."

~Thomas Carlyle

#Burke #ancestors #posterity #tradition

"An interesting thesis is that the one and only fully concrete being is God, call this the thesis of Divine Concreteness. The idea would be that God is not only the most fundamental being there can be but also the most fundamental information, or the most informational being, there can be and, as such, by virtue of the above idea of concreteness being measured by determinateness, or how much information it carries with respect to properties, God would thereby also be the most concrete being there can be. God would be the one and only fully concrete being, or the limit-point of concreteness."

~Einar Duenger Bøhn

"If the Philokalia is 'the love of the beautiful', let us remember that the "beautiful" one is none other than the Lord Jesus. In the world there has been only one positively beautiful person - Christ. Therefore, the appearance of this wonderful, infinitely beautiful person is in itself an infinite miracle. The entire Gospel of John is devoted to precisely this. In it, St. John declares that the whole miracle is in the incarnation alone, in the very manifestation or emergence of the beautiful."

“All writers, not ours alone but foreigners also, who have sought to represent Absolute Beauty, were unequal to the task, for it is an infinitely difficult one... There is in the world only one figure of absolute beauty: Christ. That infinitely lovely figure is, as a matter of course, an infinite marvel.”

~Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“Modem society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints.”

~Alasdair MacIntyre

"Everywhere in the modern world the industrial regime tends to make the unorganized or unorganizable individual, the pauper, into the victim of a kind of human sacrifice offered to the gods of civilization.”

~Jacques Maritain

“Liberalism is, on one hand, the regime without faith, the regime that hands over everything, even the essentials of the country’s destiny, to free discussion. For Liberalism, nothing is absolutely true or false. The truth is, in each case, what the greater number of votes say. Thus, it does not matter to Liberalism if a people agrees upon suicide, provided that the proposed suicide is carried out in accordance with electoral practice. And since for the functioning of electoral practice the existence of factions must be encouraged and strife between them must be stimulated, the Liberal system is the system of permanent disunion, permanent want of popular faith in any profound community of destiny.”

~José Antonio Primo de Rivera