Will Davis

“The true goal for man is to be what he does. The worth of a religion is the worth of the individuals living it. A mitsvah, therefore, is not mere doing but an act that embraces both the doer and the deed. The means may be external, but the end is personal. Your deeds be pure, so that ye shall be holy.
A hero is he who is greater than his feats, and a pious man is he who is greater than his rituals. The deed is definite, yet the task is infinite.”
― Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism

“Whenever you see Herod and Pilate befriending each other for Jesus' destruction, notice, then, the converging of the demon of fornication and vainglory for the same purpose, to kill the logos of virtue and of knowledge, conspiring with each other. For the vainglorious demon dissimulating spiritual knowledge sends it along to the demon of fornication. Thus, "Having clothed him with bright raiments," it says, "Herod sent Jesus back to Pilate.”
― Maximus the Confessor, Two Hundred Chapters on Theology

“Freedom is not simple, for it always is involved with responsibility. The relation between freedom and responsibility is not a “balance” to be expediently adjusted by governments or citizens, who without both can have neither. I have quoted John Milton’s definition of freedom before, and I am going to quote it again, for it is complex and precise enough to have the force of an essential justice: “To be free,” Milton wrote, “is precisely the same thing as to be pious, wise, just, and temperate, careful of one’s own, abstinate from what is another’s and thence, in fine, magnanimous and brave.”
― Wendell Berry, Our Only World: Ten Essays

“There is a Pagan, savage heart in me somewhere. For unfortunately the folly and idiot-cunning of Paganism seem to have far more power of surviving than its innocent or even beautiful elements. It is easy, once you have power, to silence the pipes, still the dances, disfigure the statues, and forget the stories; but not easy to kill the savage, the greedy, frightened creature now cringing, now blustering, in one's soul - the creature to whom God may well say, "thou thoughtest I am even such a one as thyself".”
― C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms