Henry Fairlie > Quotes

“The legend of our times, it has been suggested, might be "The Revenge of Failure". This is what Envy has done for us. If we cannot paint well, we will destroy the canons of painting and pass ourselves off as painters. If we will not take the trouble to write poetry, we will destroy the rules of prosody and pass ourselves off as poets. If we are not inclined to the rigors of an academic discipline, we will destroy the standards of that discipline and pass ourselves off as graduates. If we cannot or will not read, we will say that "linear thought" is now irrelevant and so dispense with reading. If we cannot make music, we will simply make a noise and persuade others that it is music. If we can do nothing at all, why! we will strum a guitar all day, and call it self-expression. As long as no talent is required, no apprenticeship to a skill, everyone can do it, and we are all magically made equal. Envy has at least momentarily been appeased,and failure has had its revenge.”
― Henry Fairlie

“This is the sin that the avaricious confess to Dante. “Our eyes would never seek the height,/Being bent on earthly matters,” so that “love of all true good was quenched in us/By avarice, and our works were left undone.”
― Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today

“Some of the evils to which theology says that Lust will give rise are: blindness of intellect in respect of divine things; precipitancy in acting without judgment; want of regard for what befits one’s state or person; inconstancy in good; hatred of God as an Avenger of such sins; love of this world and its pleasures; inordinate fear of death.”
― Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today

“I cannot answer the question, ‘Who am I?’ except in terms of some sort of statement of the plans and purposes of my life,” said Josiah Royce seventy years ago in The Philosophy of Loyalty. “I should say that a person, an individual self, may be defined as a human life lived according to a plan . . .”
― Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today

“There is something seriously at fault with a society, something that will in the end destroy us, if poverty that is voluntarily chosen is nowhere celebrated as a good. No other standard is today set against the pursuit of wealth and possessions. From the moment at which the child begins to receive the messages from the society around it, it is subject to the continual pressure of group attitudes that tell it that it will be judged only by success, and that its success will be measured largely by its acquisitiveness. No other model is set before it. The call to a life of poverty in the New Testament is passed over in silence and embarrassment. This pursuit of wealth and possessions, when conducted with such single-mindedness as it is in our societies, constantly distracts us from spiritual things and not least from the spiritual side of our natures. There is not one person who sets too high a store by wealth and possessions who is not coarsened by them.”
― Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today

“Whenever love is translated into hatred, we know that sin has entered and wreaked its havoc.”
― Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today

“People today spend interminable hours telling each other “where they’re coming from,” and “where they’re at,” when all that they are doing is inventing implausible little fictions about themselves and their lives. Every new relationship is begun with the dubious exchange of these quirkly little maps.”
― Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today

“On the one hand, there are the dieters and calorie counters; on the other, the addicts of health foods. No one now seems able to rise in the morning and go out to meet the world without stepping on the bathroom scales. These may seem to reflect a self-denying abstemiousness, but there is Gluttony in all of them. (Fastidiousness in eating is regarded in theology as just as much a fault of the sin as excess in it.) Each of them shows an inordinate interest in eating, even though it may appear to be in not eating. They make their own fetish of eating, no less than the glutton with whom we are more familiar. They are just as obsessed with their food, even if their attention is fixed only on a raw carrot and a prune; and their refrigerators and their larders tell, not merely of the time, but of the energy and the anxiety that they give to the most natural of functions.”
― Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today

“We seem to be embarrassed to talk today of fidelity, to give it much of a precedence, even though we may observe all around us that people still get hurt by unfaithfulness. If we will not speak of fidelity, then perhaps we can talk of constancy. The trouble with sexual infidelity is that it directs the constancy of our attention to someone else. We remove a part of our gaze, and turn it elsewhere. In fact we remove a part of ourselves and give it elsewhere. What comes between a couple when one of them is unfaithful is, not the other woman or the other man, but what now cannot be shared by them.”
― Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today

“What is left to Lust when its cravings at last subside, as subside in the end they will? It is alone. It has died. It has made no bonds and is in the desert that it has made, with no longer even a craving.”
― Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today

“People have been taught to believe that human knowledge is a box of tricks, which they have only to open to draw on it for what they want, so to make all well for themselves or their class or for the world.”
― Henry Fairlie, The Seven Deadly Sins Today