"But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths."
~Edmund Burke
~Edmund Burke
Forwarded from IMPERIVM
"Decadence is the abandonment of standards and a levelling-down. It is the pursuit of the common in place of the striving to reach a higher level. Decadence is the wallowing in the transient. But perhaps most of all, on the individual level, decadence is lack of real character. Decadence elevates cleverness, ‘education’ and intellectual pretension over and above experience, courage and heroism. Decadence elevates self-indulgence above self-discipline. Decadence denigrates duty, honour and loyalty. Decadence affirms those things which those of weak character espouse - pacifism, peace, equality, 'harmony’, inter-racial 'love’. Decadence is materialistic - it mocks idealism, the numinous, and the profound, and in place of the aesthetic of beauty, it champions the ugly and the banal. Decadence is, fundamentally, a manifestation of what is weak, shallow, pretentious and vain. It is the philosophy, and the aesthetics, of the coward.”
~David W. Myatt
@ImperivmRenaissance
~David W. Myatt
@ImperivmRenaissance
Forwarded from IMPERIVM
“Humility is the only virtue that no devil can imitate. If pride made demons out of angels, there is no doubt, that humility could make angels out of demons.”
~St. John Climacus
@ImperivmRenaissance
~St. John Climacus
@ImperivmRenaissance
“The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise to never have a headache or always to feel hungry.”
~C.S. Lewis
~C.S. Lewis
“Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers the most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.”
~Thomas Merton
~Thomas Merton