"The traditions of humanity support humanity and the central one is this tradition of Marriage. And the essential of it is that a free man and a free woman choose to found on earth the only voluntary state; the only state which creates and which loves its citizens. So long as these real responsible beings stand together, they can survive all the vast changes, deadlocks, and disappointments which make up mere political history."

~G.K. Chesterton

“Art has always been about trying to alleviate the pain of existence. Modern art collaborates with misery as opposed to trying to oppose it. A painting by Titian is like a Leningrad, holding out against the forces of the world—even if they’re having to eat rats in there, they still will never surrender to it—whereas the art of Tracey Emin is a complete capitulation to the world. Cutting a shark in half and putting it in a tank of piss is just art giving up. I find it very odd when they describe art as challenging, because I always thought art was meant to calm you like a lullaby, not challenge you like some skinhead in an underpass.”

~Alexander Stoddart

"My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it. It contains much that you will not be pleased to see: this I know and do not hide. But who is to rid it of these things? There is no one but you."

"This is agony, Lord, have pity on me! See, I do not hide my wounds from you; You are the Physician and I am sick; You are Merciful, I in need of mercy."

+Saint Augustine

"We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and to create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible."

~Thomas Merton

“If a man relies wholly upon his private rational powers, he will lose his faith—and perhaps the world as well, risking his nature at the devil’s chess-game. But if a man fortifies himself with normative discipline, he draws upon the imagination and the lessons of the ages, and so is fit to confront even a diabolical adversary."

~Russell Kirk

"The only thing that matters today is the activity of those who can "ride the wave" and remain firm in their principles, unmoved by any concessions and indifferent to the fevers, the convulsions, the superstitions that characterize modern generations... Not letting oneself go is what is crucial today. In this society gone astray, one must be capable of the luxury of having a character."

~Julius Evola

"Your life on earth is narrowed everywhere. Everything betrays you: people, wealth, the pleasures of the senses, even your own body will abandon you. All the elements of nature deceive you. So, see to cleave only to God, for only He is love."

+Saint John of Kronstadt

“Modern mass culture, aimed at the “consumer”, the civilization of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.”

~Andrei Tarkovsky

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."

~Leo Tolstoy

“Valor produces peace; peace, repose; repose, disorder; disorder, ruin; so from disorder, order springs; from order virtue, and from this, glory and good fortune.”

~Niccolò Machiavelli

"All great art is praise; the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own."

~John Ruskin

"Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought."

~G.K. Chesterton

"A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and microphone of his own age."

~C.S. Lewis

'for in the age of technics the tendency is for creativeness to become dehumanised, for contrivance to usurp imagination, for the will towards shape to become almost indistinguishable from a mere will toward power. There is a deflection, a mass-deflection, from the proper “habit of art” towards forms which owe their existence and meaning to what they effect rather than to what they are. Power-extension and multiplication become the objectives, and the utile is the sole factor determining the forms, and the symbolic loses altogether its central and presiding position.' - David Jones

"Many of us long for the past because we believe, correctly, that the past uniquely offered something that satisfied a core human need—namely, the need for hope for something better and everlasting beyond this life, which communities steeped in religious tradition, in which faith formed the center of one’s life and permeated every aspect of it, were able to inspire. In short, this past provided the means by which man’s spiritual thirst could be quenched. The tragedy of the present condition consists not only in the fact that we are dying of this thirst, but also of our ignorance of the reason for—or even the fact of—our condition, as well as the truth that the cure lies within our own hearts, buried though it is beneath layers of selfish and worldly attachments."

~Dr. Amir Azarvan

"You should know that the Grace of God departs because of three things: pride, egotism and passions of the flesh."

~Gerondissa Makrina of Volos

"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

"The whole tendency of modern life is towards scientific planning and organisation, central control, standardisation, and specialisation. If this tendency was left to work itself out to its extreme conclusion, one might expect to see the state transformed into an immense social machine, all the individual components of which are strictly limited to the performance of a definite and specialised function, where there could be no freedom because the machine could only work smoothly as long as every wheel and cog performed its task with unvarying regularity. Now the nearer modern society comes to the state of total organisation, the more difficult it is to find any place for spiritual freedom and personal responsibility. Education itself becomes an essential part of the machine, for the mind has to be as completely measured and controlled by the techniques of the scientific expert as the task which it is being trained to perform."

~Christopher Dawson