“Wholly unacquainted with the world in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs, on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite.”
- Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; qtd. in Raymond Williams, Culture and Society
“Scepticism, that dry-rot of intellect, had left him without a whole thought in his head. He lived in irony, and his motto was, ‘The only certainty is a full glass.’”
- Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
“The hardest thing in the world is to be where we are.”
- Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgment
“Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found.”
- Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community
“It is a trick of the devil, which he employs to deceive good souls, to incite them to do more than they are able, in order that they may no longer be able to do anything.”
- St. Vincent de Paul
“When Marco Polo came at last to Cathay, seven hundred years ago, did he not feel — and did his heart not falter as he realized — that this great and splendid capital of an empire had had its being all the years of his life and far longer, and that he had been ignorant of it? That it was in need of nothing from him, from Venice, from Europe? That it was full of wonders beyond his understanding? That his arrival was of no importance whatever? We know that he felt these things, and so has many a traveller in foreign parts who did not know what he was going to find.”
- Richard Adams
“Resist every false doctrine: and call no man heretic. The false doctrine does not necessarily make the man a heretic; but an evil heart can make any doctrine heretical.”
- S.T. Coleridge
“Domestic happiness is the greatest of things sublunary, and of things celestial it is impossible, perhaps, for unassisted man to believe anything greater; but it is not strange that those things, which, in a pure form of society, will constitute our first blessings, should in its present morbid state be our most perilous temptations. ‘He that doth not love mother or wife less than me, is not worthy of me!’”
- from Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 1 (ed. E.H. Coleridge)
“…for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon’s teeth, and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”
- John Milton
And Los beheld his Sons, and he beheld his Daughters:
Every one a translucent Wonder: a Universe within,
Increasing inwards, into length, and breadth, and heighth:
Starry & glorious…
- William Blake
… I deem it wise
To make him Nature’s playmate. He knows well
The evening star: and once when he awoke
In most distressful mood (some inward pain
Had made up that strange thing, an infant’s dream)
I hurried with him to our orchard plot,
And he beholds the moon, and hush’d at once
Suspends his sobs, and laughs most silently,
While his fair eyes that swam with undropt tears
Did glitter in the yellow moon-beam! Well –
It is a father’s tale. But if that Heaven
Should give me life, his childhood shall grow up
Familiar with these songs, that with the night
He may associate Joy!
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“To consider the matter aright, reason is nothing but a wonderful and unintelligible instinct in our souls, which carries us along a certain train of ideas, and endows them with particular qualities, according to their particular situations and relations. This instinct, ’tis true, arises from past observation and experience; but can any one give the ultimate reason, why past experience and observation produces such an effect, any more than why nature alone shou’d produce it? Nature may certainly produce whatever can arise from habit: Nay, habit is nothing but one of the principles of nature, and derives all its force from that origin.”
- David Hume
