Blair > Blair's Quotes

“Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, and men below, and the saints above, for love is heaven, and heaven is love. ”
― Sir Walter Scott

“He asked, 'Croesus, who told you to attack my land and meet me as an enemy instead of a friend?'

The King replied, 'It was caused by your good fate and my bad fate. It was the fault of the Greek gods, who with their arrogance, encouraged me to march onto your lands. Nobody is mad enough to choose war whilst there is peace. During times of peace, the sons bury their fathers, but in war it is the fathers who send their sons to the grave.”
― Herodotus, The Histories

“Nothing is more practical than finding God,
That is, than falling in a love in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination will affect everything.
It will decide what will get you out of bed in the mornings,
What you will do with your evenings,
How you spend your weekends,
What you read,
Who you know,
What breaks your heart,
And what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.”
― Pedro Arrupe

“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“Unwittingly, the feminists acknowledge the superiority of the male sex by wishing to become like men.”
― Alice von Hildebrand, The Privilege of Being a Woman

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“There is no pain on this earth like seeing the same woman look at another man the way she once looked at you.”
― Walker Percy

“Have you noticed that the narrower the view the more you can see? For the first time I understand how old ladies can sit on their porches for years.”
― Walker Percy, Lancelot

“The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“A man is lucky if he is the first love of a woman. A woman is lucky if she is the last love of a man.”
― Charles Dickens

“Life is made of so many partings welded together”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“tradition is only democracy extended through time.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.”
― John Henry Newman

“One of the greatest problems of our time is that many are schooled but few are educated.”
― Thomas More, Selected Writings

“To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

“There is nothing more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“She looked just like a painting dying to speak.”
― Aeschylus, Agamemnon

“Optima dies...prima fugit
(The best days are the first to flee)”
― Virgil

“Mine was not an Enlightened mind, I now was aware: it was a Gothic mind, medieval in its temper and structure. I did not love cold harmony and perfect regularity of organization; what I sought was variety, mystery, tradition, the venerable, the awful.”
― Russell Kirk

“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.”
― T.S. Eliot.

“I must tell you that I should really like to think there's something wrong with me- Because, if there isn't, then there's something wrong with the world itself-and that's much more frightening! That would be terrible. So I'd rather believe there is something wrong with me, that could be put right.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

“The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.”
― T.S. Eliot

“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time”
― T.S. Eliot

“The love of our private friends is the only preparatory exercise for the love of all men.”
― John Henry Newman

“With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty. We are bid to color all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in every event.”
― Cardinal John Henry Newman

“To love someone means to see them as God intended them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”
― Hannah Arendt