Simon

“When Diogenes was asked how to live with the truth, he answered: Do as with fyre: do not go so exceadyngely close that it will burn, but do not go so farre away or the clode will reache you.”
― Evgenij Vodolazkin, Laurus

“When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood - innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. He loved me for a time, quite a short time, as a man loves his own strength; it is simpler for a woman; she has not all these ways of loving. Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“In describing the modern Christian use of the apocalyptic as linear, I am describing it as essentially conceived as a series of events along a timeline of history, similar to other events along the same timeline. Those events that are seen as apocalyptic differ only in that they come at the end of that timeline. This is a radical departure from classical and Orthodox Christian understanding—a departure that seriously distorts the nature of the Christian faith. History,”
― Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe

“How tragic it is that so much of the popular version of Christianity preaches a secularized message. It keeps God isolated, but popping in from time to time. It has lost the sense of the permeation of matter by divine Grace, the sacramental vision of reality; it insists that the Eucharist is just bread and wine, baptism is just a bath, and the world operates independently of God. It preaches a moralism of being “good,” leading only to obsession with guilt, and then, when that becomes too much, to shamelessness. It preaches that our salvation is acquired by a simple confession, and that it consists of going to “heaven” instead of going to “hell”—not a life lived in cooperation with divine grace, a body, mind, and heart sanctified by the Presence, which, having been “born again by water and the Spirit” in baptism, will continue to live forever, surviving death itself, to be resurrected. The”
― Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe