"The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God's paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle - and not lose it."

“Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors.”

"The cross cannot be defeated. For it is Defeat."

~G.K. Chesterton

"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul."

~Simone Weil

"Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice."

"Love is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. A feeling comes and it may go. How can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision."

~Erich Fromm

"Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen."

~Leonardo da Vinci

"As a soldier of Christ, your virtues may be objects of hatred for the wicked, but they will never lack the approbation of the good and wise, which is the greatest and only desirable honour."

~Pope Leo XIII

"I therefore consider it wise to acknowledge the idea of God consciously, for if we do not, something else is made God; usually something very stupid such as only an enlightened intellect could hatch forth."

~Carl Jung

"If one does not believe in God, the only honest alternative is vulgar utilitarianism. The rest is rhetoric."

~Nicolás Gómez Dávila

"We find ourselves in a world of ruins—we should not forget this. And just how much may still be saved depends only on the existence or lack of men who are still capable of standing among these ruins, not in order to dictate any formulas, but to serve as examplars; not by pandering to demagogy and the materialism of the masses, but in such a way as to reawaken different forms of sensibility and interest.”

~Julius Evola

“Men are often called intelligent wrongly. Intelligent men are not those who are erudite in the sayings and books of the wise men of old, but those who have an intelligent soul and can discriminate between good and evil. They avoid what is sinful and harms the soul; and with deep gratitude to God they resolutely adhere by dint of practice to what is good and benefits the soul. These men alone should truly be called intelligent.”

+Saint Anthony The Great

"Beauty reminds us that we are more than mere matter and that we long for meaning from outside ourselves. And that is why modernity hates it."

~Dean Abbott

"If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we should know better where we are, for we should then take for certain the opposite of what the liar tells us. But the reverse of truth has a thousand shapes and a boundless field."

~Montaigne

"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."

~G.K. Chesterton

"When the whole world is running headlong towards the precipice, one who walks in the opposite direction is looked at as being crazy."

~T.S. Eliot

"Children are not a distraction from the most important work. They are the most important work."

~C.S. Lewis

"When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard 'having children' as a question of pro's and con's, the great turning point has come."

~Oswald Spengler

"Where you arrive does not matter as much as what sort of person you are when you arrive there."

~Seneca

"But my sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in Him but in myself and His other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error."

+Saint Augustine, The Confessions

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?"

~Cicero

"The past refuses to be dismissed, for it is the voice of all human wisdom."

~Russell Kirk

"The essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called 'self-realization'; but by denial, by suffering."

"The birth, death, and resurrection of Christ means that one day everything sad will come untrue."

~J.R.R. Tolkien

"Moderns seek change; tradition sought permanence."

“Traditions are answers that have been discovered to enduring questions.”

~Sir Roger Scruton

"What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything."

~H.P. Lovecraft

Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine master grant that I may
Not so much seek to be consoled as to console
To be understood, as to understand
To be loved, as to love
For it's in giving that we receive
And it's in pardoning that we are pardoned
And it's in dying that we are born
To eternal life.

+Prayer of Saint Francis