Joshua Gibbs > Quotes

“Conservatism is not about the restoration of a golden age, but the preservation of golden things.”
― Joshua Gibbs

“In a prior age, the human experience was understood as the temporal embodiment of desire, delight, fear, grief, faith, love, hope, hatred, horror, sympathy, gentleness, kindness, loyalty, fidelity, sublimity, desperation, chagrin, anger, fury, wrath, distress, discomposure, shame, dignity, indignity, glory, contempt, slight, heartbreak, fondness, tenderness, adoration, infatuation, compassion, goodwill, worship, sorrow, anguish, despair, woe, dejection, despondency, duty, angst, reverence, respect, esteem, exaltation, melancholy, disquiet, weariness, felicity, glee, bliss, ecstasy, rapture, euphoria, exhilaration, rhapsody, brotherhood, contemplation, mediation, surrender, fancy, impulse, yearning, thirst, hankering, pining, enthusiasm, need, obligation, fancy, mystery, helplessness, luck, recklessness, boldness, fearlessness, wildness, sorrow, regret, gloom, heavyheartedness, and dreaminess and ten thousand others. These are the sentiments which great art compels us to feel. But mediocre art truncates the human experience. It prunes and lops off all the diversity and richness of life and leaves us with little more than lust, amusement, self-fulfillment, and the resentment which comes from our endless search for the power that now attends victimhood.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“A man is only as free as his love of good things.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“In a society bent on progress, stability is treason.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“In "A Stolen Life," Dugard’s ability to think through questions of suffering, love, hope, and justice is indistinguishable from that of people her age who have lived "normally,” immersed in the world of blockbuster films, disposable fashion, popular music, easy virtue, virtue signaling, screen addiction, trendy political causes, and banal propaganda. The further I got into "A Stolen Life," the more I realized Dugard sounded just like the young women (and men) whose work I read in college writing workshops. My conclusion is both horrifying and offensive: for all the good our freedom is doing us we might as well have been locked up in a dungeon with demoniacs. The effects of living freely in the Modern world are not easily distinguishable from the effects of living in captivity with a psychopath.”
― Joshua Gibbs

“Tradition implies obedience and predictability, but the specialness of special things is their refusal to obey.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“Multigenerational agreement requires a willingness to honor mother and father, which is a sticking point for progressives, who invariably regard elders as traitors.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“While feasting can enlarge the soul, feasting is only true feasting when it completes a fast. The man who feasts without cease is simply a glutton.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“A man is free to do good to the extent that he does good. If a man claims he could do good, but doesn’t do it, he either doesn’t know what goodness is or he doesn’t know what freedom means.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“It is naive to assume that denominational affiliations have always been as meaningless to Christians as they are today.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“We do not deserve a better culture than the one we have; every culture is perfectly suited to the music it produces, the churches it builds, and the poems it writes. We cannot lament our inability to build a fitting sequel to St. Peter’s Basilica without simultaneously lamenting our complete lack of a theology that might compel us to do so.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“When Modern men want things which their natures rebel against, they suffer and hurt. As opposed to quitting the unnatural things which lead us into psychic and physical pain, scientists have invented drugs which enable us to painlessly continue destroying ourselves. These drugs drive a deep wedge between our bodies and our souls so that the physical torment our bodies and minds undergo cannot reach the place where suffering takes place—the soul. Because the very idea of nature entails the existence of spiritual things, a culture of death cannot fail to grow up wherever nature is rejected. Death is the separation of body and soul; however, because Modern men no longer believe in nature, they have lost the ability to describe what death even is, and so life and death are slowly conflated into the same twisted phenomenon.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“Americans have been slow to identify mediocrity because mediocre art simultaneously embraces virtues which both progressives and conservatives hold dear. In order to condemn mediocrity, one must believe that surviving the test of time is a very reliable sign of goodness, and very few persons on the political left would agree to this premise. However, condemning mediocrity also depends upon admitting that, regardless of other boons it might offer society, capitalism has not been good for art, and very few conservatives would admit this.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“Despite such verve and passion for Truth, the Christian brand is now rightly denigrated everywhere as trite and trivial. To put the word “Christian” before any kind of service, institution, or work of art is to consign the thing in question to the garbage pile of cut-rate design and cheap sentimentality.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Most people choose the music they listen to, the books the read, and the films they watch because of some event which has lately taken place in their own lives. People who are in love listen to love songs, people who are sad listen to sad songs, people who are angry listen to angry songs. Love songs are instructive for the young man in love because they teach him how to think about love and how to assign meaning to the events which occur in a romance. Sad songs teach sad people what their sadness is. Joyful songs instruct listeners on the activities and sentiments that are appropriate to joyful people. Mediocre art asks little of us, though, and so mediocrity trains hearts to shallowness, simplicity, and selfishness. In much the same way that an unpracticed, unused body will wither, bloat, and become incapable of otherwise normal tasks, so will the unpracticed and unused soul.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“Enlightenment philosophers claimed the future is in front of us and that every man is free to choose any point on the horizon and run toward it as fast as he can. Where he finally arrives depends entirely on his own preference. For this reason, the rate of cultural change has dramatically accelerated since the French Revolution. Beliefs about political right were no longer staked in nature, which does not change, but in our own wills, which are endlessly fickle. Before the Enlightenment, man understood that nature imposed limits on his will— the desire to grow swan wings was senseless, say— and that fighting these limitations would always prove a losing battle. After the Enlightenment, though, man came to believe his will had the power to coerce his nature into whatever he wanted.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“Any society at war with the past will necessarily produce an endless tidal wave of cultural artifacts that are short-lived, for the longer any film or book or song lasts, the more adverse it is to progress.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“It is possible for a man to become dangerously shallow without ever watching or listening to anything which is “sinful.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“Pleasure takes place in the body, but satisfaction is of the soul, and so things which offer purely physical pleasure cannot help egging people on to consume more and more in search of a spiritual state the carnal thing is incapable of delivering. The economy of spiritual things is different because spirit is immaterial, intellectual, and unquantifiable. There is not “more Christ” in a small bite of the Eucharist than a large one, neither is the object blessed with a bucket of holy water more holy than an object blessed with a thimble full. Inasmuch as a thing appeals more to the spirit than the body, a man needs less of it, which is why many people have accidentally eaten an entire bag of Doritos in one sitting, but no one has ever accidentally read the entire gospel of St. John in one sitting.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Having abandoned the concept of nature, Modern men have largely lost the ability to judge anything to be fake. In the same way special things cannot exist unless there are normal things, we may not declare anything fake unless we are willing to acknowledge some things are real. However, “real” is a concept which implies not only the existence of something which transcends mere appearances, but a confidence that this something can manifest itself in tangible, material forms.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“Selling an heirloom always involves converting a thing’s spiritual value into economic value, which is commonly known as “a Faustian bargain.” The devil is always willing to trade physical goods for spiritual ones; however, money has no spiritual value, which is why the love of money is the root of spiritual corruption.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“Any cultural project which only takes ten years to complete is easily undone. As an ideology, then, the problem with “Change the world” is that it is too easily accomplished. “Change” is doable over and over again, and new projects of “change” undermine and abolish the changes of a previous generation. Everyone who “changes the world” is undermining or abolishing the change some wide-eyed, well-meaning dreamer undertook just a few years ago. “Change the world” always involves crushing the dream of someone slightly older than yourself who wanted to do the same thing. Thus we reach a paradox: unless a society undertakes a project it cannot hope to accomplish, it will not accomplish anything lasting.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“As soon as one generation undertakes a project which can be finished in a single lifetime, their children have incentive to scrap that project in favor of projects more suited to their own tastes and values. Any social or cultural project which will take fifty years to accomplish encounters profound existential threats halfway through, for everyone who started the project begins to age out of productivity and those have just entered the project have both incentive and ability to redirect time and funds to a more fashionable project which does not seem so old-fashioned.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“Physical beauty is eminently more impressive, visceral, and humbling than artistic Beauty. Were a human being the likes of Nicole Kidman or Paul Newman to stand on display in the Metropolitan or the Louvre, and were patrons of the museum able to gaze with impunity—not covertly and from a distance, but from point blank range as though the living spectacles were mere portraits— many people would quickly leave behind the artistic beauty of Rembrandt and Titian.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“The problem with “special” things, though, is that they do not last. As a category of being, “special” cannot help being vampiric, and so “special” is really the opposite of “holy.” Holy things beget holy things. Because holiness shares in the boundless nature of God, there is always more holiness to go around. Holy water consecrates all that it touches as holy. Holy places confer their holiness on the activities that transpire therein. As a bishop consecrates a deacon to the position of priest, or a priest consecrates the romance of bride and groom, holy men may confer their holiness on others. Special things cannot confer their specialness on other things, though. One special thing is naturally at war with other special things. Holiness is an open system, which means a holy thing can make a common thing holy without losing its own holiness. Specialness is a closed system, though, for one thing cannot become special without devouring or absorbing the specialness of another. The goal of a new blockbuster is to make old blockbusters look dull by comparison. The goal of new clothing styles is to make old clothing styles look dowdy by comparison. The goal of a fashionable new church is to make old churches seem dull and conventional by comparison. The goal of new pornography is to make old pornography look chaste by comparison. The goal of the latest KFC sandwich is to make the last KFC sandwich seem flavorless by comparison.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” argues the Republican, who believes no one man should inherit more power than another. “Yes,” replies the Marxist, who believes no man should inherit more wealth than another. “Money corrupts, as well, and great sums of money corrupt all the more.” For every objection the Republican has to the socialist’s conception of wealth, the monarchist has a similar objection to the Republican’s conception of power.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“It is natural to care for those who have cared for us, but at the point a man has been dead a hundred years, no one alive who yet cares for him has any natural reason for doing so. In the several decades following a man’s death, those who knew him might carry a torch for his memory, describe the love they received from him, and champion the spirit they have inherited from him. However, if people are still willing to listen to a man one hundred years after his death, he speaks from the grave. After natural affection passes, if any affection remains, it is supernatural.”
― Joshua Gibbs

“Very good things exhaust the senses through the mind, while mediocre things pummel the senses without ever reaching the mind.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity

“Long term exposure to fake things makes real things seem overly dull, demanding, expensive, messy, complicated, and pretentious. Those raised on watermelon candy will find actual watermelon not sweet enough. Anyone raised on comic book movies will not find Hamlet or Paradise Lost sufficiently exciting. Anyone raised on Big Macs will find French onion soup too pungent, or else not sweet enough, not fatty enough, or not salty enough.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity

“In the last several decades, academia has more and more adamantly taught that “understanding the experiences of others” is the highest aspiration of the responsible reader... “Understanding the experiences of…” is a euphemism for coming to feel sympathy for the kind of person who has written a book, though progressives have also become profoundly critical of the idea that one kind of man may identify his own struggles with the life of another kind of man.”
― Joshua Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul From Mediocrity