good or no, these things must be built

         Men’s souls are crooked and unsound things, not good materials out of which to build friendships, families, households, cities, civilizations. But good or no, these things must be built, and we must craft them with the materials at hand, and make as strong and stubborn redoubt as we make, lest the horrors of the Night should triumph over us, not in some distant age to come, but now.”    

                   -John C. Wright    in Awake in the Night

 

 

the trick is to be bored...

The minute I was bored with a book or a subject I moved on to another one. instead of giving up reading altogether .... The trick is to be bored with a specific book, rather than with the act of reading. So the number of pages absorbed could grow faster than otherwise.

                                                   - Nassim Nicolas Taleb

I think this is why I can average around 100 books a year despite still have effects from dyslexia.

Which Regrets

      "Every decision has its price.... It's not given to anyone to have no regrets; only to decide, through the choice we make, which regrets we'll have."

        -David Weber In Fury Born

Only Very Superficial People

it is only very superficial people who abject to the superficial. To the man who sees the marvelousness of all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as its mysteries.

                                 -G. K. Chesterton

there must be harmony

There must be harmony between God and His worshippers; such as God is, must His worship be. … The man who would truly worship God, Would find and know and possess and enjoy God, must be in harmony with Him, must have a capacity for receiving Him.

                        -Andrew Murray

The Amateur

A man must lobe a thing very much if he not only practices if without any hope of fame or money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.

             - G. K. Chesterton

You can't carry through

You can't carry through any principle without doing violence to somebody, either directly or indirectly. Every time you disturb the balance of nature you let in violence. And if you leave nature alone you get violence in any case.
                                -- Dorothy Sayer

Rare indeed

It is very rare indeed for men to be wrong in their feelings concerning public misconduct; as rare to be right in their speculation upon the cause of it.

     - Edmund Burke

if you never had to make those decisions

But she wondered, as she rose, if this was the danger the gods presented to mortals: the sense that someone, somewhere, knew if all, and knew it well enough that there was no point and no need to struggle to reach a decision; one could leave it, for eternity, in their hands. If the Mother were here, Jewel would have gratefully handed the whole of the War--all of it--into her keeping. What did you become, in the end, if you never had to make those decisions and those mistakes?  

-from Skirmish by Michelle West

all devils

“‘I am a man,’ answered Father Brown; ‘and therefore have all devils in my heart.’”   - G. K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown

Restrain not thyself from doing good

I’m reading the Shepherd of Hermas and (in the translation I have) it is talking repeatedly about not restraining yourself from good. First it struck me as an odd way of putting it, because I’m not used to hearing that.. Then is struck me as odd that it would strike me as odd. There is something weird in our culture that we automatically associate the morally good with something we don’t want to do.

not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth

The church could not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium. One let one idea become less powerful and some other idea would become too powerful. It was no flock of sheep the Christian shephard was leading, but a herd of bulls and tigers, of terrible ideals and devouring doctrines, each one of them strong enough to turn to a false religion and lay waste the world.

                    - G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I love the sense this quote gives of how Christian theology just a list of plug-in ideas but an interconnected whole that encompasses the universe.