Raully > Raully's Quotes

“Instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest forever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“The nature of things is, I admit, a sturdy adversary.”
― Edmund Burke, Select Works of Edmund Burke, Volume 3: Letters on a Regicide Peace

“Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first - the story of our quest for sexual love - is well known and well charted, its vagaries form the staple of music and literature, it is socially accepted and celebrated. The second - the story of our quest for love from the world - is a more secret and shameful tale. If mentioned, it tends to be in caustic, mocking terms, as something of interest chiefly to envious or deficient souls, or else the drive for status is interpreted in an economic sense alone. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first, it is no less complicated, important or universal, and its setbacks are no less painful. There is heartbreak here too.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

“In truth history does not belong to us but rather we to it.”
― Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

“How would you expect to find community while you intentionally withdraw from it at some point? The disobedient cannot believe; only the obedient believe.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship

“He who has no conviction always lies, no matter what he says.”
― Adolf Von Harnack

“The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Childhood is not a state which only applies to the first phase of our lives in the biological sense. Rather it is a basic condition which is always appropriate to a life that is lived aright.”
― Karl Rahner

“There is a fertile stretch of flat lands in Indiana where unagarian Eastern travelers, glancing from car windows, shudder and return their eyes to interior upholstery, preferring even the swaying comparisons of a Pullman to the monotony without.”
― Booth Tarkington, The Gentleman from Indiana

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“There is a fear of voluptuousness that is itself voluptuous, just as a certain fear of death can itself be deadly.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“In Spain the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.”
― Federico Garcia Lorca

“Whatever our official pieties, deep down we all believe in lives. The sternest formalists are the loudest gossips, and if you ask a cultural-studies maven who believes in nothing but collective forces and class determinisms how she came to believe in this doctrine, she will begin to tell you, eagerly, the story of her life.”
― Adam Gopnik

“If we look into the matter of how Christian theology rose in the beginning, the Christian Church was always already earlier, and thus even now for each individual the Christian Church is earlier than theology.”
― Friedrich Schleiermacher, Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study

“The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

“The language of the King James Bible is the language of patriarchy, of an instructed order, of richness as a form of beauty, of authority as a form of good; the New English Bible is motivated by the opposite, an anxiety not to bore or intimidate. It is driven, in other words, by the desire to please and, in that way, is a form of language which has died.”
― Adam Nicolson, God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible

“There is that in the Notre Dame fan which makes him intolerable to others, namely, his unassailable confidence that in a well-ordered universe Notre Dame is meant to win all of its games.”
― Ralph M. McInerny, Lack of the Irish

“In a secular world, which is what most of us in Europe and North America live in, history takes on the role of showing us good and evil, virtues and vices. Religion no longer plays as important a part as it once did in setting moral standards and transmitting values. . . .History with a capital H is being called in to fill the void. It restores a sense not necessarily of a divine being but of something above and beyond human beings. It is our authority: it can vindicate us and judge us, and damn those who oppose us.”
― Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History

“If nothing else, a house is a place to keep books in.”
― Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead

“We never consider that the things dogs know about us are things of which we have not the faintest notion.”
― José Saramago, Death with Interruptions

“Our basic human institutions - religion, matrimony, and burial, also law, language, literature, and whatever else relies on the transmission of legacy - are authored, always and from the very start, by those who cam before. The awareness of death that defines human nature is inseparable from - indeed, it arises from, our awareness that we are not self-authored, that we follow in the footsteps of the dead. . . .
Nonhuman species obey the law of vitality, but humanity in its distinctive features is through and through necrocratic. Whether we are conscious of it or not we do the will of the ancestors; their precedents are our law; we submit to their dictates, even when we rebel against them. Our diligence, hardihood, rectitude, and heroism, but also our folly, spite, rancor, and pathologies, are so many signatures of the dead on the contracts that seal our identities. We inherit their obsessions; assume their burdens; carry on their causes; promote their mentalities, ideologies, and very often their superstitions; and often we die trying to vindicate their humiliations.
Why this servitude? We have no choice. Only the dead can grant us legitimacy. Left to ourselves we all bastards.”
― Robert Pogue Harrison

“He resented such questions as people do who have thought a great deal about them. The superficial and slipshod have ready answers, but those looking this complex life straight in the eye acquire a wealth of perception so composed of delicately balanced contradictions that they dread, or resent, the call to couch any part of it in a bland generalization. The vanity (if not outrage) of trying to cage this dance of atoms in a single definition may give the weariness of age with the cry of youth for answers the appearance of boredom.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.”
― Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

“The cemeteries are full of indispensable men.”
― Charles de Gaulle

“That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.”
― Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March

“The only “ism” Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.”
― Dorothy Parker

“One of history’s most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly and painfully, past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong or disgraceful.”
― John Carey

“Man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.”
― John Calvin

“Love, like reputation, once fled, never returns more.”
― Aphra Behn, The History Of The Nun Or The Fair Vow Breaker