Quotes thread

"What the people need in order to find a meaning in life, hence a possibility of earthly happiness, is religion and the crafts: religion because every man has need of it, and the crafts because they allow man to manifest his personality and to realise his vocation in the framework of a sapiential symbolism; every man loves intelligible work and work well done. Now industrialism has robbed the people of both things: on the one hand of religion, denied by scientism from which industry derives, and rendered unlikely by the inhuman character of the mechanistic ambience, and on the other hand the crafts, replaced precisely by machinism." Schuon

G.K. Chesterton on Stoicism:

I tried to translate some parts of a speech by Al-Hajjaj Ibn Yusuf to the people of Iraq when he became Emir.

"O people of Iraq, people of hypocrisy, schism and the worst of ethics....I am seeing ambitious eyes, elongated necks, and blossomed heads that need to be reaped and I will reap them! It's like if I am seeing the blood flowing between the beards and turbans...Amir al-Muminin instructed me to give you your salaries and send you to fight Al-Khawarij with Muhlib Ibn Safrah. Any man who doesn't answer in three days will have his blood spilled, his money taken, and his house destroyed "

When an old man, shaken with old age, protested that he can't got to war, Al-Hajjaj beheaded him and ordered his house to be ransacked

The prejudice which reduces the ethnic and cultural substance of the Catholic Church to the Mediterranean world alone is at the root of a number of fatal errors: to begin with, insufficient account was taken in Rome of the needs and rights of the Germanic soul — Protestantism was the reaction to this — and thereafter, Catholic nationalists and racists of Latin culture have obstinately refused to understand that there is no Western Christianity without the Germanic world, and that to exclude this world from Christianity or from Western civilization is to destroy the one as well as the other, or the one along with the other; indeed this has already come about to a large extent. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that the Renaissance, and later the French Revolution, were Latin, not Germanic misdeeds; to each his role, for good and for ill.

Schuon

The ape ... is there to show what man is and what he is not, and certainly not to show what he has been; far from being able to be a virtual form of man, the ape incarnates an animal desire to be human, hence a desire of imitation and usurpation; but he finds itself as if before a closed door and falls back all the more heavily into its animality, the perfect innocence of which, it can no longer recapture, if one may make use of such a metaphor; it is as if the animal, prior to the creation of man and to protest against it, had wished to anticipate it, which evokes the refusal of Lucifer to prostrate before Adam.

Schuon

The living TREE Igdrasil, with the melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs, deep-rooted as Hela, has died-out into the clanking of a World-MACHINE. 'Tree' and 'Machine:' contrast these two things. I, for my share, declare the world to be no machine! I say that it does not go by wheel-and-pinion 'motives', self-interests, checks, balances; that there is something far other in it than the clank of spinning-jennies, and parliamentary majorities; and, on the whole, that it is not a machine at all! -- The old Norse Heathen had a truer notion of God's-world than these poor Machine-Sceptics: the old Heathen Norse were sincere men.

Carlyle

He's probably the single most untalented person I've heard in my life. He's a two-bit pretentious academic, and he can't play rock'n'roll, because he's a loser. And that's why he dresses up funny. He's not happy with himself, and I think he's right. - lou reed on zappa