The Truth and Beauty Quotes

“Maybe the problem is that you are trying to understand a philosophy instead of trying to get to know a man.” I recognized this on the instant as the single smartest thing anyone had ever said to me.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“I have no interest in declaring how people should organize their personal lives. Jesus said, “Judge not,”26 and I take that to heart: if you are peering into another person’s soul, you are looking in the wrong direction. But after a long life, I can report anecdotally that all the most joyful people I have ever met were married, and all the happiest marriages I have ever seen were arranged, in some sense, on the Ephesian principles.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“To be a human being is to be a continual work of art.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“A metaphor has three parts: the object we are trying to describe, the term we use to describe it, and the idea that is conveyed when the two come together. In this, a metaphor is itself a metaphor for the Trinity. In the Trinity, the object we are trying to describe is God the Father, the term we use to describe it is Jesus the Son, and when we grasp that idea, we are filled with the Spirit.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“A work of art speaks a truth we can’t speak outright: the truth of the human experience. Love, joy, grief, guilt, beauty—no words can communicate these. We can only represent them in stories and pictures and songs. Art is the way we speak the meaning of our lives.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“This, finally, is the model of all radicalism, in the grip of which men reenact the fall of man as adults so often reenact their childhood traumas. Radicals transgress the paradox of virtue because they claim the knowledge of good and evil for themselves and strip the power to freely choose virtue from others. In this way, they transform their imagined paradise into a living hell.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“Because God’s reality is reality, there is no way to escape it. Because it is goodness itself, there is no way to defy it with anything but evil. When it comes to the politics of rebellion and change, the rebel can either seek to work in partnership with God’s creation or find himself outside it and thus in hell.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“It is the paradox of virtue knit into the fabric of reality: you will not be free unless you are virtuous; you cannot be virtuous unless you are free.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“Future generations would solve the material inequalities in the sex lives of men and women by means of birth control and abortion. Through the miracle of science, a woman can now medicate her body so that men may use it for their pleasure without consequence or attachment. And, should the medication fail, she is free to have doctors kill the child in her womb and drag it out in pieces to be sold for profit and used for medical experimentation.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“I hope that others will find what I found: that that journey—that literary journey of the Romantics through an age of unbelief back to the entryway of faith—is nothing less than the journey home.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“that the deepest experience of human existence, the most creative, the most joyful, and surely the most true is the experience taught to us by the incarnate Word of God and bought for us by his crucifixion and resurrection.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“Unbelief—this was and is at the core of our divisions because faith was and is at the core of Western culture.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“The gospel is good news, not good advice,” popular preacher Timothy Keller writes. “The gospel is not primarily a way of life. It is not something we do, but something that has been done for us and something that we must respond to.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“Today, as the Romantics feared, we are all materialists in one sense or another. Just listen to how we talk. Instead of saying, “The roller-coaster ride made me excited,” we say, “I had an adrenaline rush.” Instead of saying, “Running makes me feel great,” we say, “Running gives me a dopamine high.” We say, “I have depression”—I hear this all the time—rather than, “I am depressed.” We speak as if our emotions were chemical reactions rather than spiritual reactions communicated to our bodies by chemical means.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“those strains that can imagine women’s “empowerment” only in traditionally male terms of physical strength, career success, and work in scientific professions centered on things rather than the professions centered on people that women all over the world prefer. The antifeminine cohort recoil at such Mary-Shelleyan qualities as “submission, love, tenderness, self-sacrifice, devotement, sympathy.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“In any case, in later years, the embittered Claire wrote this: “The worshippers of free love not only preyed upon one another, but preyed equally upon their own individual selves turning their existence into a perfect hell . . . Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love I saw the two first poets of England . . . become monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery.”40”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“It seems possible to me that a spiritually whole woman might regard this system as an endless nightmare of abuse, a cancellation of her feminine humanity in service to the libertine pleasures of soul-dead men. Perhaps such women will one day reject the system outright. Perhaps they will begin to turn technology to their own purposes and use it to reestablish the sort of home industries that will allow them to live a modern life more like the life of Proverbs 31.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“And while he was speaking, did we not feel our hearts burning within us?”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“In the end, life becomes literature, and literature has meaning because life has meaning.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“If God listened to mothers,” the rabbi responds severely, “we would all rot away in a bog of security and easy living.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“Each of us learns to do this, Wordsworth said, in his first experience of love, when his soul “drinks in the feelings of his Mother’s eye!”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“Creation is a fractal: it is metaphors all the way down. The three-part Logos creates man, man creates metaphors for reality, reality is a metaphor for the Logos.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“Metaphor is even built into the basic structure of creation. DNA is a code. A code is a kind of language. DNA expresses an idea—the idea of a man and a woman together—and brings it into being as you or me.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“Meaning is above nature—it is supernatural—because it is the idea that nature expresses.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“Only Coleridge was philosophically brilliant enough to understand that their declarations about nature—its immortality, its beauty and truth—needed to rest upon the supernatural, “a kind of common sensorium”—as he called Jesus Christ—“the total Idea that modifies all thoughts.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“28 It is as if he had begun to suspect—to feel, to sense, to imagine—that there was a realm beyond nature, a living reality that nature only symbolized.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“This same thing happens too, I think, in one of the most profound and important scenes in all of literature: Moses before the burning bush. Like autumn, the bush contains life-and-death in a single eternal process, the growing bush never consumed by the destructive fire that never dies. Like autumn, the bush, when Moses looks at it, reveals itself to be a person: I AM.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“To explore the mind of man is to know the face of damnation and salvation both—to know them in the only way we can know them, a human way, just as we know light and good and evil and the falling silver rain.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

“Maybe the problem is that you are trying to understand a philosophy instead of trying to get to know a man.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus