Marx saw that history is subjected to determinism, that it is of the realm of matter. It is extraordinary therefore that in looking for justice, he ascribed to matter a capacity for producing justice. After all, why does history subjected to necessity automatically produce a happy Communist society? What god watches over it? We can understand that matter through evolution produced man. Why should it care that he be happy and live in a happy society? No one yet can understand why matter should have been “a machine for the manufacture of Good,” as Simone Weil says. This is the main contradiction at the base of today’s major philosophical controversy, and it cannot be bypassed.

Miłosz, Czesław. To Begin Where I Am. 2001. p. 215

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