"Beauty awakens the soul to act."

~Dante Alighieri

"What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level."

~C. S. Lewis

"After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear."

~J.R.R. Tolkien

"There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society, successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion."

~Will Durant

"The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid."

~Livy

“You will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”

~C.S. Lewis

“Religion, opium for the people. To those suffering pain, humiliation, illness, and oppression, it promised a reward in an afterlife. And now we are witnessing a transformation. A true opium for the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murder, we are not going to be judged.”

~Czesław Miłosz

"It must be recognised that man in his limited and relative earthly life is capable of bringing about the beautiful and the valuable only when he believes in another life, unlimited, absolute, eternal. That is a law of his being. A contact with this mortal life exclusive of any other ends in the wearing-away of effective energy and a self satisfaction that makes one useless and superficial. Only the spiritual man, striking his roots deep in infinite and eternal life, can be a true creator.”

~Nikolai Berdyaev

“The strength or weakness of a society depends more on the level of its spiritual life than on its level of industrialization. Neither a market economy nor even general abundance constitutes the crowning achievement of human life. If a nation's spiritual energies have been exhausted, it will not be saved from collapse by the most perfect government structure or by any industrial development. A tree with a rotten core cannot stand.”

~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"Against this panorama of nations, morals, and religions rising and falling, the idea of progress finds itself in dubious shape. Is it only the vain and traditional boast of each "modern" generation? Since we have admitted no substantial change in man's nature during historic times, all technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends - the acquisition of goods, the pursuit of one sex by the other, the overcoming of competition, the fighting of wars. One of the discouraging discoveries of our disillusioning century is that science is neutral: it will kill for us as readily as it will heal, and will destroy for us more readily than it can build. How inadequate now seems the proud motto of Francis Bacon, "Knowledge is power"! Sometimes we feel that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which stressed art and mythology rather than science and power, may have been wiser than we, who repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purposes."

~Will Durant

“Our most serious obstacle is that people traveling this downward path develop an insensibility which increases with their degradation. Loss is perceived most clearly at the beginning; after habit becomes implanted, one beholds the anomalous situation of apathy mounting as the moral crisis deepens. It is when the first faint warnings come that one has the best chance to save himself; and this, I suspect, explains why medieval thinkers were extremely agitated over questions which seem to us today without point or relevance... We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent.”

~Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

“The study of the past is an exercise in humility; while the smug are nervously trammeled up in their self-opinion, the humble are free to rejoice in what is genuinely great or noble or beautiful. The adulator of the new must believe that a great oblong in brick and glass and steel marks an ‘advance’ in every respect from Chartres or Notre Dame de Paris, but the humble student of history has no stake in that game. He is free to wonder at the glory that a supposedly benighted people could accomplish—and then free to wonder where the real artistic darkness is to be found, then or now.”

~Anthony Esolen

“The Socialist saw plainly the rights of the Society; the Anarchist saw the rights of the Individual. How therefore were these to be reconciled? The Church stepped in at that crucial point and answered, By the Family—whether domestic or Religious. For in the Family you have both claims recognized: there is authority and yet there is liberty. For the union of the Family lies in Love; and Love is the only reconciliation of authority and liberty.”

~Robert Hugh Benson

"Liberty has produced scepticism, and scepticism has destroyed liberty. The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined. They thought they were only leaving it undefined, when they were really leaving it undefended. Men merely finding themselves free found themselves free to dispute the value of freedom."

~G.K. Chesterton

"Rather fail with honor than succeed by fraud."

~Sophocles

"I have always been of the opinion that unpopularity earned by doing what is right is not unpopularity at all, but glory."

~Cicero

"It is better for you to be defeated while speaking the truth, than to be victorious through deceit."

~Sextus

“We have everything upside down. Where we should be idealists- our moral, economic, and religious lives, we are pragmatic realists. Where we should be realists- our political life, we are instead intransigent idealists.”

~E.H. Looney

“People are turning away from Christianity today not because it is too hard but because it is too soft.”

~Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

'The revolt of the engineer against the architect, of utility building against the transcendental claims of art, has seemingly ended with a total victory for the new powers. But the unity thus achieved has been purchased by allowing a single department, that of the factory, to act as dictator over the rest, and by permitting downright and intolerable violence to be done to the natural demands of individual jobs, for while the material requirements of these may usually be met, the same cannot be said of what may be called the spiritual and emotional content.' - Hans Sedlmayr

"No traditional civilization has ever seen such large masses condemned to obscure, soulless, automatic labor, to slavery which does not even have as its counterpart the high stature and the tangible reality of figures of lords and rulers, but is found imposed in a seemingly innocuous way by the tyranny of the economic factor and the absurd structures of a more or less collectivized society. And the fact that the modern vision of life, in its materialism, has deprived the individual of any possibility of introducing into his destiny an element of transfiguration, of seeing in it a sign and a symbol, the slavery of today is the most gloomy and the most desperate of all that we have ever known."

~Julius Evola

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule."

~H.L. Mencken