“There are progressions in which the last step is sui generis —incommensurable with the others —and in which to go the whole way is to undo all the labour of your previous journey. To reduce the Tao to a mere natural product is a step of that kind. Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away.”
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“Value always involves some kind of reference to the activities of persons.' The process of human life on the earth is not ruled by disembodied values but by the personalities and doings and sayings of unique individual men and women.”
― Symbolism and Belief
― Symbolism and Belief
“Through failure to contemplate these Infinites, men have rashly rushed into the examination of nature, as though they bore some proportion to her.”
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“When a natural discourse paints a passion or an effect, one feels within oneself the truth of what one reads, which was there before, although one did not know it. Hence one is inclined to love him who makes us feel it, for he has not shown us his own riches, but ours. And thus this benefit renders him pleasing to us, besides that such community of intellect as we have with him necessarily inclines the heart to love.”
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“Therefore it is also, that He neither endured the death of John, who was beheaded, nor was He sawn asunder, like Isaiah: even in death He preserved His body whole and undivided, so that there should be no excuse hereafter for those who would divide the Church.”
― On the Incarnation
― On the Incarnation
Michael’s 2025 Year in Books
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