"There is no such thing as pure pleasure; some anxiety always goes with it."

~Ovid

“The pure in heart shall see God, because they always do His will. Purity does not begin in the body but in the will. From there it flows outward, cleansing thought, imagination, and, finally, the body. Bodily purity is a repercussion or echo of the will. Life is impure only when the will is impure.”

― Venerable Fulton J. Sheen,

"Almost nothing material is needed for a happy life, for he who has understood existence."

~Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

"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

"Just as the Lord is solicitous about our salvation, so too, the murder of men, the devil, strives to lead a man into despair.

A lofty and sound soul does not despair over misfortunes, of whatever sort they may be. Our life is as it were a house of temptations and trials; but we will not renounce the Lord for as long as He allows the tempter to remain with us and for as long as we must wait to be revived through patience and secure dispassion!

Judas the betrayer was fainthearted and unskilled in battle, and so the enemy, seeing his despair, attacked him and forced him to hang himself, but Peter, a firm rock, when he fell into great sin, like one skilled in battle did not despair nor lose heart, but shed bitter tears from a burning heart, and the enemy, seeing these tears, his eyes scorched as by fire, fled far form him wailing in pain."

+St. Seraphim of Sarov

“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

"Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created."

~Roger Scruton

1 Corinthians 2:15

He who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one.

"Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed."

~Friedrich Nietzsche

"If the truth shall kill them,

let them die."

~Immanuel Kant

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Until now, mankind never knew a god whom they could love truly, so they didn't love each other either, which brought them misfortune, because as the way light comes from the sun, so is happiness born out of love. No rulers or philosophers ever conceived this truth, therefore love didn't exist in Greece and Rome; and when I say Rome I think of the whole world. The cold and dull teachings of the stoics, which the virtuous look up to, forge their hearts the way a sword is hardened, but makes it more indifferent, not more loving."

~Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis

"Bad heroes give glamour to flaws of character."

~Plato

"What is hypocrisy? The desire to look better than you are; the hiding of things you do, because you would not be supposed to do them, because you would be ashamed to have them known where you are known. The doing of them is foul; the hiding of them, in order to appear better than you are is fouler still."

~George MacDonald

"What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one."

~Hannah Arendt

"The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy."

~William Hazlitt

"Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."

~C.S. Lewis

"Beauty is an exquisite flower, and its perfume is virtue."

~Giovanni Ruffini

"Kings can occasionally be bought, democracies are always for sale."

~Aristokles Smith

“When a government is dependent upon bankers for money, they and not the leaders of the government control the situation, since the hand that gives is above the hand that takes. Money has no motherland; financiers are without patriotism and without decency; their sole object is gain.”

"The only institution ever devised by men for mastering the money-power of the State, is Monarchy."

~Napoleon Bonaparte