I am not afraid to say that a devout and God-fearing man is superior as a human specimen to a restless mocker who is glad to style himself an “intellectual,” proud of his cleverness in using ideas which he claims as his own though he acquired them in a pawnshop in exchange for simplicity of heart.

Miłosz, Czesław. To Begin Where I Am. 2001. p. 224

Many respect reputation, few respect conscience.

multi famam, conscientiam pauci verentur.

Pliny the Younger. Epp. 3.20.8

[Music alone can express] a fringe of indefinite extent, of feeling which we can only detect, so to speak, out of the corner of the eye and can never completely focus; of feeling of which we are only aware in a kind of temporary detachment from action.

Eliot, T.S. “The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.” Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. 1933.

The poetry I wrote before the war and later in Nazi-occupied Poland would have been utterly without hope if not for my awareness of the beauty of the things of the earth, and that beauty was incomprehensible, as it coexisted with horror.

Miłosz, Czesław. To Begin Where I Am. 2001. p. 23

In a world dominated by technology and mass mobility, most of us are first- or second-generation immigrants from the country to big cities. The theme of homeland, the whole nostalgic rhetoric of patria fed by literature since Odysseus journeyed to Ithaca, has been weakened if not forgotten.

Miłosz, Czesław. To Begin Where I Am. 2001. p. 25

Philosophical happiness is to want little.

Edmund Burke, On Scarcity

Should a man suffer what he did, right justice would be done.
εἴ κε πάθοι τά τ᾽ ἔρεξε, δίκη κ᾽ ἰθεῖα γένοιτο.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 5.5.3, 1132b27

The beginnings of a decline, in every age of history, have always had the appearance of being reforms.

Chesterton, Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

Chesterton, Orthodoxy

But there is no separation between religion and philosophy admissible. We do not mean to say by this, that the two coincide or harmonize in their teaching; but that the two are not two, but one. We have no original means of arriving at the knowledge of truth but the supernatural revelation of God. This revelation is the necessary basis of all that can be received as truth, whether termed religious truth or philosophical truth. Revelation is as necessary to furnish the basis of philosophy, as it is to furnish the basis of religion. Philosophy, then, is not a system of truth built up on a separate foundation, independent of religion, and able, and therefore having the right, to sit in judgment on religion, to overthrow it, or to explain and verify it; but is, if it be philosophy, identical with religion- the form which religion necessarily assumes when subjected to the action of the human mind. Instead, then, of seeking to reconcile religion and philosophy, we should seek their synthesis, to resolve philosophy into religion, and to find in divine revelation the one solid basis for our whole faith, whether termed religious or philosophical.

Orestes Brownson. “Schmucker’s Psychology”