Simon > Simon's Quotes

“Helping a person in need is good in itself. But the degree of goodness is hugely affected by the attitude with which it is done. If you show resentment because you are helping the person out of a reluctant sense of duty, then the person may recieve your help but may feel awkward and embarrassed. This is because he will feel beholden to you. If,on the other hand, you help the person in a spirit of joy, then the help will be received joyfully. The person will feel neither demeaned nor humiliated by your help, but rather will feel glad to have caused you pleasure by receiving your help. And joy is the appropriate attitude with which to help others because acts of generosity are a source of blessing to the giver as well as the receiver.”
― St. John Chrysostom

“Happiness can only be achieved by looking inward & learning to enjoy whatever life has and this requires transforming greed into gratitude.”
― John Chrysostom

“Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“Here's another piece of advice, only date people who have read a different set of books than you have read, it will save you lots of time in the library.”
― Tony Kushner

“It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“How dreadful boredom is — how dreadfully boring; I know no stronger expression, no truer one, for like is recognized only by like… I lie prostrate, inert; the only thing I see is emptiness, the only thing I live on is emptiness, the only thing I move in is emptiness. I do not even suffer pain… Pain itself has lost its refreshment for me. If I were offered all the glories of the world or all the torments of the world, one would move me no more than the other; I would not turn over to the other side either to attain or to avoid. I am dying death. And what could divert me? Well, if I managed to see a faithfulness that withstood every ordeal, an enthusiasm that endured everything, a faith that moved mountains; if I were to become aware of an idea that joined the finite and the infinite.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“But what is it, to be an artist? Nothing shows up the general human dislike of thinking, and man's innate craving to be comfortable, better than his attitude to this question. When these worthy people are affected by a work of art, they humbly say that that sort of thing is a 'gift.' And because in their innocence they assume that beautiful and uplifting results must have beautiful and uplifting causes, they never dream that the 'gift' in question is a very dubious affair and rests upon extremely sinister foundations.
[...]
Listen to this. I know a banker, grey-haired business man, who has a gift for
writing stories. He employs this gift in his idle hours, and some of his stories are of the
first rank. But despiteI say despite-this excellent gift his withers are by no means
unwrung: on the contrary, he has had to serve a prison sentence, on anything but trifling
grounds. Yes, it was actually first in prison that he became conscious of his gift, and his
experiences as a convict are the main theme in all his works. One might be rash enough
to conclude that a man has to be at home in some kind of jail in order to become a poet.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“...sanity involves a certain measure of impersonation, not simply for the benefit of husband and servants but for the sake, first and foremost, of one's own convictions.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“Beauty is a whore, I like money better.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“Arsenius the Great: I have often regretted the things I have said, but I have never regretted my silence.”
― Evgheni Vodolazkin, Laurus

“When Diogenes was asked how to live with the truth, he answered: Do as with fyre: do not go so exceadyngely close that it will burn, but do not go so farre away or the clode will reache you.”
― Evgenij Vodolazkin, Laurus

“Be her and be yourself, simultaneously. Be outrageous. Being pious is easy and pleasant, go ahead and make yourself hated.”
― Evgenij Vodolazkin

“Christianity that has purged the Church of the sacraments, and of the sacramental, has only ideas to substitute in their place. The result is the eradication of God from the world in all ways other than the theoretical.”
― Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe

“The legacy of our culture’s image-smashing (a powerful part of the Puritan world) is secularization—though now replete with its own images. If we fail to give a proper account of the role that images play in Christianity, the result will not be a Christianity with no images, but simply the dominance of cultural images and a subtle conformity to the world. The only image that needs to be discarded is the one we have of ourselves as God. We are not He. Worship God. Give honor to whom honor is due. It”
― Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe

“How tragic it is that so much of the popular version of Christianity preaches a secularized message. It keeps God isolated, but popping in from time to time. It has lost the sense of the permeation of matter by divine Grace, the sacramental vision of reality; it insists that the Eucharist is just bread and wine, baptism is just a bath, and the world operates independently of God. It preaches a moralism of being “good,” leading only to obsession with guilt, and then, when that becomes too much, to shamelessness. It preaches that our salvation is acquired by a simple confession, and that it consists of going to “heaven” instead of going to “hell”—not a life lived in cooperation with divine grace, a body, mind, and heart sanctified by the Presence, which, having been “born again by water and the Spirit” in baptism, will continue to live forever, surviving death itself, to be resurrected. The”
― Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe

“In describing the modern Christian use of the apocalyptic as linear, I am describing it as essentially conceived as a series of events along a timeline of history, similar to other events along the same timeline. Those events that are seen as apocalyptic differ only in that they come at the end of that timeline. This is a radical departure from classical and Orthodox Christian understanding—a departure that seriously distorts the nature of the Christian faith. History,”
― Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present: Christianity in a One-Storey Universe

“If there are no books. There is no civilization.”
― Thomas Cahill

“When people hate with all that energy, it is something in themselves they are hating. Alex is hating all the illusions of boyhood - innocence, God, hope. Poor Lady Marchmain has to bear all that. He loved me for a time, quite a short time, as a man loves his own strength; it is simpler for a woman; she has not all these ways of loving. Now Alex is very fond of me and I protect him from his own innocence.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

“Whatever you find, you also find the fear that you may lose it. Whatever you fall in love with fills you with the sorrow of its loss...”
― St. Nikolai Velimirovich

“If you have reasons to love someone, you don’t love them.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The very notion of nature as a closed system entirely sufficient to itself is plainly one that cannot be verified, deductively or empirically, from within the system of nature. It is a metaphysical (which is to say “extra-natural”) conclusion regarding the whole of reality, which neither reason nor experience legitimately warrants.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“What I find most mystifying in the arguments of the authors I have mentioned, and of others like them, is the strange presupposition that a truly secular society would of its nature be more tolerant and less prone to violence than any society shaped by any form of faith. Given that the modern age of secular governance has been the most savagely and sublimely violent period in human history, by a factor (or body count) of incalculable magnitude, it is hard to identify the grounds for their confidence.”
― David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

“Religion used to be the opium of the people. To those suffering humiliation, pain, illness, and serfdom, religion promised the reward of an after life. But now, we are witnessing a transformation, a true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, we are not going to be judged.”
― Czesław Miłosz