“Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is.”
Pascal Pensées
“She [Iris Murdoch] cannot believe in a personal God, she says, because God cannot be ‘a thing among other things.’ That is disappointing. One learns in Christian Theology 101 that God is not a thing among things, an existent among existents, but the Absolute Being of all that is, was, or ever can be. But apparently Iris Murdoch did not learn that in her Anglo-Irish Protestant childhood. It is truly disconcerting how often this happens. One encounters people who say they do not believe in God only to discover, upon examination, that the God they do not believe in I do not believe in either. But it is especially disconcerting in someone of the intellectual stature of Iris Murdoch.”
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things December 2003
In my latest Epoch Times column I explain why we talk a lot less about free speech than we used to, and a lot less convincingly.
“there are aspects of our experience which hint at an incompleteness in what we are and that encourage the expectation of a fulfilment whose ground could only be in something or someone other than ourselves. Peter Berger has drawn our attention to ‘signals of transcendence’ found in every life: (a) an argument from order (essentially the intuition that history is not a tale told by an idiot; the parental role of comforting a frightened child is not the acting of a loving lie); (b) an argument from play (cheerfulness, not to say joy, keeps breaking in); (c) an argument from hope (something is held to lie in the future which is necessary to the completion of the present); (d) an argument from damnation (our outrage at Hitler and Stalin is an intuition of the transcendent moral seriousness of the world); (e) an argument from humour (there is a perceived incongruity in our experience which ‘reflects the imprisonment of the human spirit in the world’). I would want to add to these an argument from mathematics. The nature of that subject is a hotly disputed philosophical question, but for many of its practitioners its pursuit has the character of discovery rather than construction. They would agree with St Augustine that ‘men do not criticise it like examiners but rejoice in it like discoverers’. Here is the intimation of an independent world of everlasting truth which we are able to explore.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“Man is born ridiculous, as can easily be seen if you look at him soon after he is born.”
G.K. Chesterton, “Shaw, The Philosopher,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“Many moderns treat taste as if it were a matter of morality. I can only hope that they do not treat morality as a matter of taste.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Sept. 1, 1906 quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (November-December 2021)
“the only serious reason which I can imagine inducing any one person to listen to any other is, that the first person looks to the second person with an ardent faith and a fixed attention, expecting him to say what he does not expect him to say…. clearly it is quite true that whenever we go to hear a prophet or teacher we may or may not expect wit, we may or may not expect eloquence, but we do expect what we do not expect. We may not expect the true, we may not even expect the wise, but we do expect the unexpected. If we do not expect the unexpected, why do we go there at all? If we expect the expected, why do we not sit at home and expect it by ourselves?”
G.K. Chesterton Heretics
“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable.”
Seneca Epistulae Morales #71 section 3 quoted (among many other places) by https://libquotes.com/seneca/quote/lbt5f6w