Ben Vedder

“When conversion takes place, the process of revelation occurs in a very simple way — a person is in need, he suffers, and then somehow the other world opens up. The more you are in suffering and difficulties and are 'desperate' for God, the more He is going to come to your aid, reveal Who He is and show you the way out...”
― Seraphim Rose, God's Revelation to the Human Heart

“What, more realistically, is this “mutation,” the “new man”? He is the rootless man, discontinuous with a past that Nihilism has destroyed, the raw material of every demagogue’s dream; the “free-thinker” and skeptic, closed only to the truth but “open” to each new intellectual fashion because he himself has no intellectual foundation; the “seeker” after some “new revelation,” ready to believe anything new because true faith has been annihilated in him; the planner and experimenter, worshipping “fact” because he has abandoned truth, seeing the world as a vast laboratory in which he is free to determine what is “possible”; the autonomous man, pretending to the humility of only asking his “rights,” yet full of the pride that expects everything to be given him in a world where nothing is authoritatively forbidden; the man of the moment, without conscience or values and thus at the mercy of the strongest “stimulus”; the “rebel,” hating all restraint and authority because he himself is his own and only god; the “mass man,” this new barbarian, thoroughly “reduced” and “simplified” and capable of only the most elementary ideas, yet scornful of anyone who presumes to point out the higher things or the real complexity of life.”
― Seraphim Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age

“Unter der wehmütig herabhängenden Krempe eines Filzhutes, dessen Alter, Farbe udn Gestalt selbste dem schärfsten Denker einiges Kopfzerbrechen verursacht haben würden, blickte zwischen einem Wald von verworrenen, schwarzen Barthaaren eine Nase hervor, die von fast erschreckendem Ausmaß war und jeder beliebigen Sonnenuhr als Schattenwerfer hätte dienen können. Infolge dieses gewaltigen Bartwuchses waren außer dem so verschwenderisch ausgestatteten Riechwerkzeug von den übrigen Gesichtsteilen nur die zwei kleinen, klugen Äuglein zu bemerken, die mit einer außerordentlichen Beweglichkeit gebabt zu sein schienen und mit schalkhafter List auf mir ruhten.”
― Karl May, Winnetou: Band 1

“I walked a mile with Pleasure;
She chatted all the way;
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.

I walked a mile with Sorrow;
And ne’er a word said she;
But, oh! The things I learned from her,
When Sorrow walked with me.”
― Robert Browning Hamilton