Harper R

“No one spoke of hatred of the Russians. the feeling experienced by all the Chechens, from the youngest to the oldest, was stronger than hate. It was not hatred, for they did not regard those Russian dogs as human beings, but it was such repulsion, disgust, and perplexity at the senseless cruelty of these creatures, that the desire to exterminate them — like the desire to exterminate rats, poisonous spiders, or wolves — was as natural an instinct as that of self-preservation.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murat

“It is not very easy to see,” Mircea Eliade writes, “how the discovery that the primal laws of geometry were due to the empirical necessities of the irrigation of the Nile Delta can have any bearing on the validity or otherwise of those laws.” We can argue here in the same way. For it is really no easier to understand how the fact that the first emergence of the idea of God may possibly have been provoked by a particular spectacle, or have been linked to a particular experience of a sensible nature, could affect the validity of the idea itself. In each case the problem of its birth from experience and the problem of its essence or validity are distinct. The problems of surveying no more engendered geometry than the experience of storm and sky engendered the idea of God. He important thing is to consider the idea in itself; not the occasion of its birth, but its inner constitution. If the idea of God in the mind of man is real, then no fact accessible to history or psychology or sociology, or to any other scientific discipline, can really be its generating cause.”
― Henri de Lubac, The Discovery of God

“Nietzsche, in cursing our age, sees in it the heritage of the Gospel, while Dostoevsky, cursing it just as vigorously, sees in it the result of a denial of the Gospel”
― Henri de Lubac, Drama of Atheistic Humanism

“كانت لشجيرة (التتري) ثلاثة أغصان، وكان أحدها مقطوعاً وما تبقى من الغصن يتدلى كيدٍ مقطوعة، وكان على كل من الغصنين الآخرين زهرة. كانت الزهرتان حمراوين ذات يوم، أما الآن فهما سوداوان. وكان أحد الغصنين مكسوراً ونصفه متدلياً إلى أسفل مع زهرةٍ متسخةٍ في طرفه؛ أما الغصن الآخر فكان لايزال منتصباً، رغم أنه ملطخ بالوحل الأسود. وكان واضحاً أن عجلة عربة مرت على النبتة مرارا، ثم انتصبت ثانية ولذلك كانت مائلة، ولكن منتصبة رغم ذلك. كأنما أقتلعت قطعة من جسدها، وانتزعت أحشاؤها، وقطعت يدها، وفقئت عينها، لكنها ظلت واقفة ولم تستسلم للإنسان الذي يبيد كل إخوته من حوله.
قلت في نفسي: ((يالها من قدرة! لقد انتصر الإنسان على كل شيء وأباد ملايين النباتات، فيما هذه النبته لاتزال صامدة ولم تستسلم!))”
― Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murád