“I fully agree with Leo Tolstoy when he said more or less the following: ‘People say it’s shameful to change one’s convictions. But I say: it’s shameful not to.’”
Vladimir Voinovich The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union
“We must not suppose that the appearance of the world is the same today as it was before sin.”
Martin Luther, quoted in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [as part of a discussion of growing interest in geology from the 16th century on, including clergymen both arguing for a young earth and using fossils etc. to prove it was old].
“Sanctified people got more fire.”
Musician James Brown, who grew up in the flamboyant evangelical United House of Prayer for All People of the Church on the Rock of the Apostolic Faith, quoted in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“His jokes may be much worse in your opinion than they are in his opinion; but after all they must be jokes; they cannot be entirely shapeless mysteries, like many modern works of philosophy.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Sherlock Holmes” in A Handful of Authors, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world.”
G.K. Chesterton “The War of the Gods and Demons” in The Everlasting Man quoted in “Everlasting” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)
“Across the Roman world, wailing at the sides of roads or on rubbish tips, babies abandoned by their parents were a common sight. Others might be dropped down drains, there to perish in the hundreds. The odd eccentric philosopher aside, few had ever queried this practice. Indeed, there were cities who by ancient law had made a positive virtue of it: condemning to death deformed infants for the good of the state. Sparta, one of the most celebrated cities in Greece, had been the epitome of this policy, and Aristotle himself had lent it the full weight of his prestige. Girls in particular were liable to be winnowed ruthlessly. Those who were rescued from the wayside would invariably be raised as slaves. Brothels were full of women who, as infants, had been abandoned by their parents – so much so that it had long provided novelists with a staple of their fiction. Only a few peoples – the odd German tribe and, inevitably, the Jews – had stood aloof from the exposure of unwanted children. Pretty much everyone else had always taken it for granted. Until, that was, the emergence of a Christian people. What the implications might be for infants tossed out with the trash was best demonstrated not by Basil, nor by Gregory, but by their sister. Macrina, the eldest of nine siblings, was in many ways the most influential of them all. She it was who had persuaded her brother to abandon the law and devote himself to Christ; similarly, she could be hailed by Gregory as the most brilliant of his instructors. Erudite, charismatic and formidably ascetic, she devoted herself to a renunciation of the world's pleasures so absolute as to fill her contemporaries with awe; and yet she did not abandon the world altogether. When famine held Cappadocia in its grip, and ‘flesh clung to the bones of the poor like cobwebs’, then Macrina would make a tour of the refuse tips. Those infant girls she rescued she would take home and raise as her own. Whether it was Macrina who had taught Gregory or Gregory Macrina, both believed that within even the most defenseless newborn child there might be glimpsed a touch of the divine.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“In the end Augustus, skeptic and realist, became convinced that moral reform awaited a religious renaissance. The agnostic generation of Lucretius, Catullus, and Caesar had run its course, and its children had discovered that the fear of the gods is the youth of wisdom. Even the cynical Ovid would soon write, Voltaireanly: expedit esse deos, et ut expedit esse putemus: ‘it is convenient that there should be gods, and that we should think they exist.’”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“One of the main things that Chesterton says about Charles Dickens, whose work he so greatly appreciates, is that he represents ‘the conjunction of common sense with uncommon sensibility.’ Now, because of Jane Austen we regard ‘sense’ and ‘sensibility’ as opposites, but Chesterton says they are actually the same. ‘They both mean receptiveness or approachability by the facts outside us.’ Still, there is a ‘popular distinction between sensibility and sense, particularly in the form called common sense. Common sense is a sensibility duly distributed in all normal directions; sensibility has come to mean a specialized sensibility in one.’”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)