Seth > Seth's Quotes

“I am quite sure I am more afraid of people who are themselves terrified of the devil than I am of the devil himself.”
― Santa Teresa de Jesús, The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself

“The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“An intense copper calm, like a universal yellow lotus, was more and more unfolding its noiseless measureless leaves upon the sea.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Prayer and comfortable living are incompatible.”
― Teresa of Ávila, The Way of Perfection

“The jagged mountains were pure blue in the dawn and everywhere birds twittered and the sun when it rose caught the moon in the west so that they lay opposed to each other across the earth, the sun whitehot and the moon a pale replica, as if they were the ends of a common bore beyond whose terminals burned worlds past all reckoning.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“For truly barren is profane education, which is always in labor but never gives birth. For what fruit worthy of such pangs does philosophy show for being so long in labor? Do not all who are full of wind and never come to term miscarry before they come to the light of the knowledge of God, although they could as well become men if they were not altogether hidden in the womb of barren wisdom?”
― Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses

“We came to know that love is the soul of the world, though its body bleeds, and we must learn to bleed with it.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Island of the World

“Because your question searches for deep meaning,
I shall explain in simple words”
― Dante Alighieri, Inferno

“We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past -- whether he admits it or not -- can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”
― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Seeing the Form

“Your cold mornings are filled with the heartache about the fact that although we are not at ease in this world, it is all we have, that it is ours but that it is full of strife, so that all we can call our own is strife; but even that is better than nothing at all, isn't it? And as you split the frost-laced wood with numb hands, rejoice that your uncertainty is God's will and His grace toward you that that is beautiful, and a part of a greater certainty, as your own father always said in his sermons and to you at home. And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.”
― Paul Harding

“Everything is made to perish; the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so. No, he thought. The wonder of anything is that it was made in the first place. What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?”
― Paul Harding

“…and the only thing common to all of this is that I feel sorrow so deep, it must be love...”
― Paul Harding, Tinkers

“Madness it is to hope that human minds
can ever understand the Infinite
that comprehends Three Persons in One Being.

Be satisfied with quia unexplained,
O Human race! If you knew everything,
no need for Mary to have borne a son.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 2: Purgatorio

“High justice would in no way be debased
if ardent love should cancel instantly
the debts these penitents must satisfy.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 2: Purgatorio

“Soft as the early morning breeze of May,
which heralds dawn, rich with the grass and flowers,
spreading in waves their breathing fragrances,

I felt a breeze strike soft upon my brow:
I felt a wing caress it, I am sure,
I sensed the sweetness of ambrosia.”
― Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Volume 2: Purgatorio

“If you, free as you are of every weight
had stayed below, then that would be as strange
as living flame on earth remaining still."

And then she turned her gaze up toward the heavens.”
― Dante Alighieri, Paradise

“Fate's arrow, when expected, travels slow.”
― Dante Alighieri, Paradise

“Lady, you who are so great, so powerful,
that who seeks grace without recourse to you
would have his wish fly upward without wings.”
― Dante Alighieri, Paradise

“O grace abounding and allowing me to dare
to fix my gaze on the Eternal Light,
so deep my vision was consumed in it!

I saw how it contains within its depths
all things bound in a single book by love
of which creation is the scattered leaves:

how substance, accident, and their relation
were fused in such a way that what I now
describe is but a glimmer of that Light.”
― Dante Alighieri, Paradise

“Automobiles are unreliable and dangerous slaves. They frequently revolt and kill their masters. I hate them.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Island of the World

“The mountains are intimations of transcendence, which he is now free to pursue, and the walking writes messages in every cell of his body, telling him that he is not locked inside a cement box, nor in a water drum, but is moving forward.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Island of the World

“The poet who sees himself as a hero or a prophet, or a priest of the socio-political forces to which he is loyal, which he believes are the historical necessities of his times, too easily becomes a puppet. He has no external measure with which to assess reality. Whether he submits to the forces or rejects them, he becomes a parody of himself, and then without knowing it submits his gifts to the demons of his era. He loses his place in the continuity of time. He becomes dependent on social affirmation and the drug of exalted feelings common to all revolutionaries. He destroys, even as he thinks he creates.”
― Michael D. O'Brien, Island of the World

“...free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

“That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood

“A love of nature keeps no factories busy.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The whole planet reeks of mysticism without revelation.”
― Dan Simmons, Hyperion

“Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“All horsepower corrupts.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts

“Often, half in a bay of the mountains and half on a headland, a small and nearly amphibian Schloss mouldered in the failing light among the geese and the elder-bushes and the apple trees. Dank walls rose between towers that were topped with cones of moulting shingle. Weeds throve in every cranny. Moss mottled the walls. Fissures branched like forked lightning across damp masonry which the rusting iron clamps tried to hold together, and buttresses of brick shored up the perilously leaning walls. The mountains, delaying sunrise and hastening dusk, must have halved again the short winter days. Those buildings looked too forlorn for habitation. But, in tiny, creeper-smothered windows, a faint light would show at dusk. Who lived in those stone-flagged rooms where the sun never came? Immured in those six-foot-thick walls, overgrown outside with the conquering ivy and within by genealogical trees all moulting with mildew? My thoughts flew at once to solitary figures…a windowed descendant of a lady-in-waiting at the court of Charlemagne, alone with the Sacred Heart and her beads, or a family of wax-pale barons, recklessly inbred; bachelors with walrus moustaches, bent double with rheumatism, shuddering from room to room and coughing among their lurchers, while their cleft palates called to each other down corridors that were all but pitch dark.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts