Confessions of a Heretic Quotes

“In the face of sorrow, imperfection and the fleetingness of our affections and joys, we ask ourselves ‘why?’. We need reassurance. We look to art for the proof that life in this world is meaningful and that suffering is not the pointless thing that it so often appears to be, but the necessary part of a larger and redeeming whole.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

“Kitsch is fake art, expressing fake emotions, whose purpose is to deceive the consumer into thinking he feels something deep and serious, when in fact he feels nothing at all.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“Originality requires learning, hard work, the mastery of a medium and – most of all – the refined sensibility and openness to experience that have suffering and solitude as their normal cost.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“The main point, it seems to me, is to maintain a life of active risk and affection, while helping the body along the path of decay, remembering always that the value of life does not consist in its length but in its depth.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

“The Arts Council exists to subsidise those artists, writers and musicians whose work is important. But how do bureaucrats decide that something is important? The culture tells them that a work is important if it is original, and the proof that a work is original is that the public doesn’t like it. Besides, if the public did like it, why would it need a subsidy? Official patronage therefore inevitably favours works that are arcane, excruciating or meaningless over those that have real and lasting appeal.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic: Selected Essays

“The Czech novelist Milan Kundera made a famous observation. ‘Kitsch,’ he wrote, ‘causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: how nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!’ Kitsch, in other words, is not about the thing observed but about the observer. It does not invite you to feel moved by the doll you are dressing so tenderly, but by yourself dressing the doll. All sentimentality is like this: it redirects emotion from the object to the subject, so as to create a fantasy of emotion without the real cost of feeling it. The kitsch object encourages you to think ‘look at me feeling this; how nice I am and how lovable’. That is why Oscar Wilde, referring to one of Dickens’s most sickly death-scenes, said that ‘a man must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell’.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic: Selected Essays

“Kitsch tells you how nice you are: it offers easy feelings on the cheap. Beauty tells you to stop thinking about yourself, and to wake up to the world of others. It says, look at this, listen to this, study this - for here is something more important than you. Kitsch is a means to cheap emotion; beauty is an end in itself. We reach beauty through setting our interests aside and letting the world dawn on us. There are many ways of doing this, but art is undeniably the most important, since it presents us with the image of human life - our own life and all that life means to us - and asks us to look on it directly, not for what we can take from it but for what we can give to it. Through beauty art cleans the world of our self-obsession.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

“Kitsch tells you how nice you are: it offers easy feelings on the cheap. Beauty tells you to stop thinking about yourself, and to wake up to the world of others. It says, look at this, listen to this, study this - for here is something more important than you. Kitsch is a means to cheap emotion; beauty is an end in itself. We reach beauty through setting our interests aside and letting the world dawn on us. There are many ways of doing this, but art is undeniably the most important, since it presents us with the image of human life - our own life and all that life means to us - and asks us to look on it directly, not for what we can take from it but for what we can give to it. Through beauty art cleans the world of our self-obsession”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

“Thus it was that the pioneering communities of America very quickly made laws for themselves, formed clubs, schools, rescue squads and committees in order to deal with the needs that they could not address alone, but for which they depended on the cooperation of their neighbours. The associative habit that so impressed Tocqueville was not merely an expression of freedom: it was an instinctive move towards government, in which a shared order would contain and amplify the responsibilities of the citizens.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“People become free individuals by learning to take responsibility for their actions. And they do this through relating to others, subject to subject. The free individuals to whom the Founders appealed were free only because they had grown through the bonds of society, to the point of taking full responsibility for their actions and granting to each other the rights and privileges that established a kind of moral equality between them.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“Only certain kinds of social networks encourage people to see themselves as individuals, shielded by their rights and bound together by their duties. Only in certain conditions are people united in society not by organic necessity but by free consent. To put it simply, the human individual is a social construct. And the emergence of the individual in the course of history is part of what distinguishes our civilisation from so many of the other social ventures of mankind.2”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“It is therefore pertinent to consider not only the bad side of government – which Americans can easily recognise – but also the good. For American conservatives are in danger of appearing as though they had no positive idea of government at all, and were in the business simply of opposing all new federal programs, however necessary they may be to the future and security of the nation. Most of all, they seem to be losing sight of the truth that government is not only natural to the human condition, but an expression of those extended loyalties over time, which bind generation to generation in a relation of mutual commitment.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“Government is not what so many conservatives believe it to be, and what people on the left always believe it to be when it is in other hands than their own – namely a system of power and domination.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“I have argued against the idea of animal rights elsewhere.5 My argument stems, not from a disrespect for animals, but from a respect for moral reasoning, and for the concepts – right, duty, obligation, virtue – which it employs and which depend at every point on the distinctive features of self-consciousness. But perhaps the greatest damage done by the idea of animal rights is the damage to animals themselves. Elevated in this way to the plane of moral consciousness, they find themselves unable to respond to the distinctions that morality requires. They do not distinguish right from wrong; they cannot recognise the call of duty or the binding obligations of the moral law. And because of this we judge them purely in terms of their ability to share our domestic ambience, to profit from our affection, and from time to time to reciprocate it in their own mute and dependent way. And it is precisely this that engenders our unscrupulous favouritism – the favouritism that has made it a crime in my country to shoot a cat, however destructive its behaviour, but a praiseworthy action to poison a mouse, and thereby to infect the food-chain on which so many animals depend.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“Dogs do not judge, and their love is unconditional only because it has no conception of conditions.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“If we base our love for our dog on the premise that he, like us, is a person, then we damage both him and ourselves. We damage him by making demands that no animal can fully understand – holding him to account in ways that make no sense to him. We will feel bound to keep him alive, as we keep each other alive, for the sake of a relation that, being personal, is also eternal.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“Now it seems to me that the right way to love a dog is to love him not as a person, but as a creature that has been raised to the edge of personhood, so as to look into a place that is opaque to him but from which emerge signals that he understands in another way than we who send them.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“Tragedy reminds us that beauty is a redemptive presence in our lives: it is the face of love, shining in the midst of desolation.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“We need reassurance. We look to art for the proof that life in this world is meaningful and that suffering is not the pointless thing that it so often appears to be, but the necessary part of a larger and redeeming whole.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“In art, however, we create a realm of the imagination, in which each beginning finds its end, and each fragment is part of a meaningful whole.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“We reach beauty through setting our interests aside and letting the world dawn on us. There are many ways of doing this, but art is undeniably the most important, since it presents us with the image of human life – our own life and all that life means to us – and asks us to look on it directly, not for what we can take from it but for what we can give to it. Through beauty art cleans the world of our self-obsession.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“Official patronage therefore inevitably favours works that are arcane, excruciating or meaningless over those that have real and lasting appeal.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“In figurative painting, in tonal music, in the cliché-ridden poems of heroic love and mythic glory, we find the same disease – the artist is not exploring the human heart but creating a puffed-up substitute, and then putting it on sale.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“All sentimentality is like this: it redirects emotion from the object to the subject, so as to create a fantasy of emotion without the real cost of feeling it.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“Hence for a long time now it has been assumed that there can be no authentic creation in the sphere of high art which is not in some way a ‘challenge’ to the complacencies of our public culture. Art must give offence, stepping out of the future fully armed against the bourgeois taste for the conforming and the comfortable, which are simply other names for kitsch and cliché. But the result of this is that offence becomes a cliché.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“Artists and critics get together in order to take themselves in, the artists posing as the originators of astonishing breakthroughs, the critics posing as the penetrating judges of the true avant-garde.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“The fake is a person who has rebuilt himself, with a view to occupying another social position than the one that would be natural to him.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“Anyone can lie. It suffices to say something with the intention to deceive. Faking, however, is an achievement. To fake things you have to take people in, yourself included. The liar can pretend to be shocked when his lies are exposed: but his pretence is part of the lie. The fake really is shocked when he is exposed, since he had created around himself a community of trust, of which he himself was a member.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“Oscar Wilde defined the cynic as the one who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic, Revised Edition

“Now it seems to me that there are bad ways of loving a horse: ways that are bad for the horse, and also bad for the one who loves him. A love that regards the horse as a play-thing, whose purpose is to satisfy the whims of a rider, to be an object of cuddling and caressing of a kind that the horse himself can neither reciprocate nor understand – such a love is a way of disregarding the horse. It is also in its own way corrupt. A person who lavishes this kind of affection on a horse is either deceiving himself or else taking pleasure in a fantasy affection, treating the horse as a means to his own emotion, which has become the real focus of his concern. The horse has become the object of a self-regarding love, a love without true care for the thing that occasions it. Such a love takes no true note of the horse, and is quite compatible with a ruthless neglect of the animal, when it loses (as it will) its superficial attractions. Horses treated in this way are frequently discarded, like the dolls of children. And”
― Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic: Selected Essays