But let the colours you lay on be violent, gorgeous, terrific colours, because my feelings are like that.
I never discuss anything else except politics and religion. There is nothing else to discuss.
So strong is tradition that later generations will dream of what they have never seen.
Few except the poor preserve traditions. Aristocrats live not in traditions but in fashions.
What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.
There is the lesson of “Cinderella,” which is the same as that of the Magnificat – exaltavit humiles.
What had happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world was coloured by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural passions.
I know the Unknown God,” said the little priest, with an unconscious grandeur of certitude that stood up like a granite tower. “I know his name; it is Satan. The true God was made flesh and dwelt among us. And I say to you, wherever you find men ruled merely by mystery, it is the mystery of iniquity. If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.
The paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings.
This cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age.
Reason is always reasonable, even in the last limbo, in the lost borderland of all things. I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is really the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God Himself is bound by reason.
The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already sovered with scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulant as humanity.
In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was quite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in crowds down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high post in the State.
It might be said that the Thomist begins with something solid like the taste of an apple, and afterwards deduces a divine life for the intellect; while the Mystic exhausts the intellect first, and says finally that the sense of God is something like the taste of an apple.
Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession.
Obciously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself.
Through all this modern muddle there runs the curious principle of sacrificing the ancient uses of things because they do not fit in with the modern abuses.
We may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting.
Revolutionists amke a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform the reform, which is often very much wanted.
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.