Jon > Jon's Quotes

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Today only the person who no longer believes in a happy ending, only he who has consciously renounced it, is able to live. A happy century does not exist; but there are moments of happiness, and there is freedom in the moment.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees

“I came to realize that one single human being, comprehended in his depth, who gives generously from the treasures of his heart, bestows on us more riches than Caesar or Alexander could ever conquer. Here is our kingdom, the best of monarchies, the best republic. Here is our garden, our happiness.”
― Ernst Jünger, The Glass Bees

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
― C.S. Lewis

“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.”
― Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship and the Heroic in History

“America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil. Before the settlers, before the Indians... the evil was there... waiting.”
― William S. Burroughs

“The instant that the blade tore open his flesh, the bright disk of the sun soared up and exploded behind his eyelids.”
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses

“He was always thinking of death, and this had so refined him that the physical seemed to fall away, freeing him from the pull of earth and enabling him to walk about some distance above its surface. Indeed he felt that even his distaste and hatred for the affairs of the world no longer stirred him deeply.”
― Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses