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“Politicians are of course an artificially privileged and protected class; more privileged and protected than any of the aristocracies of the past. An aristocrat sometimes had his head cut off by the public executioner, at the command of the public authority. A gentleman was sometimes run through the body by another gentleman, in an affair of private honour. As our politics make light alike of private honour and public authority, the politician is probably the first ruler in all history who runs no risks by the act of ruling.”

— G. K. Chesterton, New Witness, June 24 1921 (via the-last-crusade)

#GKC #G. K. Chesterton #New Witness #politics #politicians #government #accountability

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But is the comfortable doctrine…that we are all inevitably mild. We cannot be monsters of vice. We need not be monsters of virtue. And everyone loses sight of the true and terrible and inspiriting doctrine—the old doctrine that unless we strive every instant to be monsters of virtue, we ourselves may easily be monsters of vice. There is nothing nearer to us than madness; as every man knows who recalls some one moment of his life. “Inhuman monsters do not really exist, except in fairy-tales”! There are plenty of inhuman monsters in the modern world; inhuman monsters control commerce and rule continents. The only real difference between fairy-tale and modern fact is this: that in fairy-tales the monsters are fought. That is one of the very many superiorities of fairy-tales.

–G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, February 3, 1906

#GKC #G. K. Chesterton #fairytales #ILN

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“Both capitalism and socialism are opposite sins against property. Capitalism emphasizes private rights to property without any social responsibility to the common good; socialism emphasizes the social use of property, to the forgetfulness of personal rights. The true solution is one in which the rights to property are personal, but the responsibility is social. A man is free on the inside because he can call his soul his own; he is free on the outside because he can call his property his own.”

— Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Crisis in History

#Fulton Sheen #Fulton J. Sheen #property #rights #freedom #Crisis in History

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Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.

All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united—united with each other and against earlier and later ages—by a great mass of common assumptions.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?”—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.

The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

— C. S. Lewis, On The Reading of Old Books, introduction to Athanasius' On the Incarnation

#Reading #books #time #c. s. lewis #CS Lewis

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But is the comfortable doctrine…that we are all inevitably mild. We cannot be monsters of vice. We need not be monsters of virtue. And everyone loses sight of the true and terrible and inspiriting doctrine—the old doctrine that unless we strive every instant to be monsters of virtue, we ourselves may easily be monsters of vice. There is nothing nearer to us than madness; as every man knows who recalls some one moment of his life. “Inhuman monsters do not really exist, except in fairy-tales”! There are plenty of inhuman monsters in the modern world; inhuman monsters control commerce and rule continents. The only real difference between fairy-tale and modern fact is this: that in fairy-tales the monsters are fought. That is one of the very many superiorities of fairy-tales.

–G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, February 3, 1906

#GKC #G. K. Chesterton #Illustrated London News #Vice #virtue #fortitude #fairytales

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“The true secret and hope of human life is something much more dark and beautiful than it would be if suffering were a mark of sin. A mere scheme of rewards and punishments would be some thing much meaner and more mechanical than this exasperating and inspiring life of ours. An automatic scheme of ‘Karma’ or ‘reaping what we sow’ would be just as gross and material as sowing beans or reaping barley. It might satisfy mechanicians or monists or theosophists or cautious financiers, but not brave men. It is no paradox to say that the one thing that would make suffering intolerable would be the thought that it was systematically inflicted upon sinners. The one thing that would make our agony infamous would be the idea that it was deserved. On the other hand, the doctrine which makes it most endurable is exactly the opposite doctrine, that life is a battle in which the best put their bodies in the front, in which God sends only his holiest into the hail of the arrows of hell. In the book of Job is foreshadowed that better doctrine, full of a dark chivalry, that he that bore the worst that man can suffer was the best that bore the form of man.” 

— G.K. Chesterton 

#GKC #G. K. Chesterton #suffering #pain #hope #meaning

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The fear peculiar to man cannot be overcome by reason, but only by the presence of someone who loves him.

Pope Benedict XVI, “Difficulties with the Apostles’ Creed” in Fundamental Speeches from Five Decades (Ignatius, 2012)

#love #fear #courage #courage comes from being loved #pope benedict xvi #Josef Cardinal Ratzinger

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“If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: that in falling and rising again we are always kept in that same precious love.”

— Julian of Norwich (via milkboydotnet)

#not kept safe #but always kept in love #Julian of Norwich #love #faith

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“A book is a door, you know. Always and forever. A book is a door into another place and another heart and another world.”

― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

#catherynne m. valente #the Girl who fell beneath fairyland and led the revels there #books #reading

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“each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen”

— Anne Sexton, excerpt from “Courage,” from The Awful Rowing Towards God

#Spring #hope #poetry #of the free verse variety #Poems #Anne Sexton #Courage

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Mary Oliver, Worm Moon

#Mary Oliver #Worm Moon #Poetry #Poem #March #Spring

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"That book, for example," I reply. "What an extraordinary thing to hold in your hand." "I guess?" "A book captures a story within its pages. Not like a specimen pinned up lifelessly for display, but vivid and alive. A whole world lies within the cover, a life waiting to be lived by each new reader." "You still have stories in the future," she points out. "We still have stories," I agree. "But they live in the ether. The book in that display case represents something we will never know. Something... permanent." "Stories never die," she counters. "They do not. But in a book, you always know where to find them again. They have a home."

Aurora’s End by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

#Zila #Aurora's End #Amie Kaufman #Jay Kristoff #books #reading #stories

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"Cynicism is fashionable in the current grimdark era, the attitude that we are too smart to be taken in by idealism. And god knows it’s true that human beings are capable of evil–not only of committing atrocities, but of reifying atrocity into a cultural ethos...But human beings are also capable of breathtaking self-sacrifice and compassion and grace, and denying that gives as false a view of human nature as denying our capacity for evil.

"And that, I think, is where hope comes in. If we understand 'escapism' as the Escape of the Prisoner rather than the Flight of the Deserter, then surely what motivates it, more than anything else, is hope. The hope that the prison is not eternal. The hope of communicating with other prisoners. The hope that if you keep chipping away at the bars long enough, one of them will fall out. And I refuse utterly to classify that hope as weak or foolish."

—Katherine Addison, "Of Better Worlds and Worlds Gone Wrong"

#Katherine Addison #Of Better Worlds and Worlds Gone Wrong #hope #Story

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“A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental: they necessarily are reflected in his theology.”

— Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

#beauty #life #theology #dogma #its all connected and if you are ignoring Beauty which is a facet of God who is Truth Beauty Goodness and Love you are completely lacking #Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger #pope benedict xvi #pope emeritus Benedict XVI

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I sometimes feel appalled at the thought of the sum total of human misery all over the world at the present moment: the millions parted, fretting, wasting in unprofitable days – quite apart from torture, pain, death, bereavement, injustice. If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens! And the products of it all will be mainly evil – historically considered. But the historical version is, of course, not the only one. All things and deeds have a value in themselves, apart from their ‘causes’ and ‘effects’. No man can estimate what is really happening at the present sub specie aeternitaris. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success – in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in. So it is in general, and so it is in our own lives. …. But there is still some hope that things may be better for us, even on the temporal plane, in the mercy of God. And though we need all our natural human courage and guts (the vast sum of human courage and endurance is stupendous, isn’t it?) and all our religious faith to face the evil that may befall us (as it befalls others, if God wills) still we may pray and hope. I do. And you were so special a gift to me, in a time of sorrow and mental suffering, and your love, opening at once almost as soon as you were born, foretold to me, as it were in spoken words, that I am consoled ever by the certainty that there is no end to this. Probable under God that we shall meet again, 'in hale and in unity’, before very long

JRR Tolkien, in a letter to his son Christopher in the army, during WW2 (via magpie-trove)

#JRRT #J. R. R. Tolkien #Letters #eternity #immortal soul #hope

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"For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt.

There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators of definable justice. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown the rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor."

- G.K. Chesterton, from Orthodoxy (1908)

#GKC #Gilber Keith Chesterton #G. K. Chesterton #orthodoxy #wealth #morality

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William Wordsworth, Book VI: The Church-Yard Among the Mountains, from The Excursion (1814)

#autumn #poetry #poems #William Wordsworth #The Excursion #October