“for as a costly jewel retains its value even if hidden in a dung-hill, so old age and discretion are to be respected even in the vile persons of our subjects.“
The Tisroc in C.S. Lewis A Horse and His Boy
“Some surviving literary works from this period [Egypt’s First Intermediate Period 2200-2050 BC] betray blank despair; others proclaim a crass hedonism; and still others seek a basis for restoration of social order by insisting upon the necessity of personal righteousness.”
William McNeill The Rise of the West
“A man’s judgement that whisky is bad for him is not invalidated by the fact that when the bottle is at hand he finds desire stronger than reason and succumbs…. Life, in other words, is as habit-forming as cocaine. What then? If I still held creation to be ‘a great injustice’ I should hold that this impulse to retain life aggravates the injustice.”
C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy (explicitly rejecting G.K. Chesterton's Manalive test that someone who claims to believe life is pointless will object vehemently if you offer to shoot them)
“There are many genuinely good finite things in this world, and even unbelievers can derive much pleasure from them: human love, and music, and the stars and the sea. But ultimately, Pascal is right: these are only well-mixed drinks served aboard the Titanic.”
Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined & Explained
“If I had only a single temporal blessing to wish you, I would not hesitate a moment: May you be spared long enough to know at least one evening of old friends, dark bread, good wine, and strong cheese. If even exile be so full, what must not our fullness be?”
Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb
“The instinct of the human soul perceives that the fool may be permitted to praise himself, but that the wise man ought to praise God.”
G.K. Chesterton “The True Vanity of Vanities” in The Apostle and the Wild Ducks, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 “Nos. 1 & 2” Sept.-Oct. 2007
“I am a hard-shelled materialist myself, I suppose. But I was reminded of Chesterton last week by a report of a conversation between one of the would-be Islamikaze bombers, Muktar Said-Ibrahim, and a former neighbour of his in Stanmore, the suburb of north London where he grew up. ‘He asked me,’ Sarah Scott recalled, ‘if I was Catholic because I have Irish family, and I said I didn't believe in anything, and he said I should. He told me he was going to have all these virgins when he got to Heaven if he praises Allah. He said if you pray to Allah and if you have been loyal to Allah you would get 80 virgins, or something like that.’ Now it is the easiest thing in the world to make fun of the notion, apparently a commonplace among jihadists, that a suicide bomber who successfully blows up a decent number of infidels is rewarded in heaven with 80 virgins. (I personally can think of nothing more terrifying than 80 virgins; I can just picture the belles of St Trinian's running amok.) But is it, I wonder, significantly stranger to believe, like Sarah Scott, in nothing at all?”
Niall Ferguson in the Telegraph July 31, 2005
“I grant you that my children need their meals balanced…. My own feeling, however, is that they need something else even more. They need to have their tastes unbalanced: to have them skewed, driven off dead center, and fastened firmly on the astonishing oddness of the world.”
Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb