"All art is in its origin essentially symbolical and ritual, and only through a late degeneration, indeed a very recent degeneration, has it lost its sacred character so as to become at last the purely profane 'recreation' to which it has been reduced among our contemporaries."

~René Guénon

“What they had done in their youth, and what for millenniums had been man’s vocation, joy, and pleasure - to ride a horse, to plough in the morning the streaming field, to walk behind the oxen, to mow the yellow grain in the blazing summer heat while streams of sweat poured down the tanned body and the women who bound the sheaves could hardly keep in step with the mowers, to rest at noon for a meal in the shade of green trees—all this, praised by the poets since times immemorial, was now passed and gone. Joy in labour had disappeared.”

~Ernst Jünger

“There have always been some forms of religion in the world and wicked men who opposed them... Never before has there been a sacrilegious conspiracy of every human talent against its Creator... Men of this age have prostituted genius to irreligion and, according to the admirable phrase of Saint Louis on his deathbed, 'They have waged war against God with His own gifts.'"

~Joseph de Maistre

"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim. An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will."

~Gustave Le Bon

"The regime of diversions, surrogates, and tranquilizers that pass for today's 'distractions' and 'amusements' does not yet allow the modern woman to foresee the crisis that awaits her when she recognizes how meaningless are those male occupations for which she has fought, when the illusions and the euphoria of her conquests vanish, and when she realizes that, given the climate of dissolution, family and children can no longer give her a sense of satisfaction in life."

~Julius Evola

"Often we wield the truth like a claymore instead of treating others with humility and gentleness. We must speak the truth in love. That truth may be painful but we must apply it like a salve that it might heal. Often our words are spoken with pride which obscure the truth rather than reveal it."

"Art, as we have known it, stands on the threshold of the transcendental. It points beyond this world of accidental and disconnected things to another realm, in which human life is endowed with an emotional logic that makes suffering noble and love worthwhile. Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption—of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a ‘kingdom of ends’. In an age of declining faith art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and immortal longings of our species. Hence aesthetic education matters more today than at any previous period in history."

~Roger Scruton

“Democracy is not a fact. It is an idea. This idea inspires laws. And these laws and their institutions reveal themselves to be more and more disastrous, destructive and ruinous, more hostile to the natural tendencies of manners, the spontaneous interplay of interests, and the development of progress. Why? Because the democratic idea is false, as it is in disagreement with nature. Because the democratic idea is bad, in that it constantly subjects the best to the worst, the superior to the inferior.”

~Charles Maurras

“In fact, all that deserves to be said - and by that I mean all the words capable of nourishing the inner silence of man and of directing him towards the untranslatable mystery of his origin and of his end - has been proclaimed and repeated a thousand times over the centuries before us.”

~Gustave Thibon

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

~C.S. Lewis

"The need for ceaseless agitation, for unending change, and for ever-increasing speed is matching the speed with which events themselves succeed one another. It is a dispersion in a multiplicity that is no longer unified by consciousness of any higher principle; in daily life, as in scientific ideas, it is analysis driven to an extreme, endless subdivision, a veritable disintegration of human activity in all the orders in which this can still be exercised... These are the inevitable results of an ever more pronounced materialization, for matter is essentially multiplicity and division, and this is why all that proceeds from matter can beget only strife and all manner of conflicts between peoples as between individuals. The deeper one sinks into matter, the more the elements of division and opposition gain force and scope; and, contrariwise, the more one rises toward pure spirituality, the nearer one approaches that unity which can only be fully realized by consciousness of universal principles."

~René Guénon

"Every one of the popular modern phrases and ideals is a dodge in order to shirk the problem of what is good. We are fond of talking about "liberty"; that, as we talk of it, is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "progress"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. We are fond of talking about "education"; that is a dodge to avoid discussing what is good. The modern man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty." This is, logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it." He says, "Away with your old moral formulae; I am for progress." This, logically stated, means, "Let us not settle what is good; but let us settle whether we are getting more of it." He says, "Neither in religion nor morality, my friend, lie the hopes of the race, but in education." This, clearly expressed, means, "We cannot decide what is good, but let us give it to our children."

~G.K. Chesterton

"We have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art... Industry without art is brutality."

~Ananda Coomaraswamy

“The individual is no longer rooted in society as a tree in a forest, rather he is comparable to the passenger in a rapidly moving vehicle whose name may be Titanic, but also Leviathan. As long as the weather holds and the outlook is pleasant, he will scarcely notice the curtailment of his freedom. He may even be filled with optimism and with the consciousness of power produced by the sense of speed. But all this changes when the fiery volcanic islands and icebergs emerge on the horizon. Then not only will technology claim a right to dominate fields other than the procurement of comfort, but at the same time the lack of freedom will become apparent-be it in the victory of elemental forces or in the fact that individuals who have remained strong acquire the means to exercise absolute power.”

~Ernst Jünger

#Chesterton #family #state

‘It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.”

~Marie-Louise von Franz

"Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate... Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself... It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd."

~Alexis de Tocqueville

"Is progress real? We frolic in our emancipation from theology, but have we developed a natural ethic–a moral code independent of religion–strong enough to keep our instincts of acquisition, pugnacity, and sex from debasing our civilization into a mire of greed, crime, and promiscuity? Have we really outgrown intolerance, or merely transferred it from religious to national, ideological, or racial hostilities? Are our manners better than before, or worse?... Have our laws offered the criminal too much protection against society and the state? Have we given ourselves more freedom than our intelligence can digest? Or are we nearing such moral and social disorder that frightened parents will run back to Mother Church and beg her to discipline their children, at whatever cost to intellectual liberty? Has all the progress of philosophy since Descartes been a mistake through its failure to recognize the role of myth in the consolation and control of man?"

~Will Durant

"It's not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things, and vindicate himself under God's heaven as a god-made Man, that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs. Show him the way of doing that, the dullest daydrudge kindles into a hero."

~Thomas Carlyle