As a whole, mankind can never get rid of the need for religious self-identification: who am I, where did I come from, where do I fit in, why am I responsible, what does my life mean, how will I face death? Religion is a paramount aspect of human culture. Religious need cannot be excommunicated from culture by rationalist incantation. Man does not live by reason alone.
— Leszek Kołakowski, 1991
A romantic is basically a person who feels that the world is full of hidden meanings—that discovery and adventure lie around every corner. This seems to me a broader, and therefore truer, attitude than that of the pessimist who feels that human life is short, brutal and pointless. The romantic recognizes that the problem lies in our own limitations, in the narrowness of our senses. So when a romantic also happens to be a realist, he is likely to devote a great deal of his life to a search for meaning—which is synonymous with self-transformation.
— Colin Wilson
The problems of man can be neither exactly defined nor even remotely solved. Whoever hopes that Christianity can solve them ceases to be a Christian.
— Nicolás Gómez Dávila
The religious life begins when we discover that God is not a postulate of ethics, but the only adventure in which it is worth the trouble to risk ourselves.
— Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Beauty is a fragile and vulnerable quality, and moreover one that is difficult to achieve; ugliness, by contrast, is unbreakable and invulnerable, and very easy to achieve.
— Theodore Dalrymple
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
Christianity completes paganism by adding confidence in God to fear of the divine.
— Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Four-fifths of man’s greatest art, said Henry Adams, was created in those supposedly dark days before the enlightenment, to the honor of Jesus and Mary.
— Anthony Esolen
The small contemporary man knows what his name is and what it is directly derived from. That is the extent of his certainty. And yet… In the sense of time, it is only a horizontal perception, something ridiculously limited. As in the continuous eruptions at the surface of the earth, he finds himself shipwrecked on top of billions of other men… From the vertical perception, from where the scale of the past increases, that which would make his own past noble, whatever the modesty of his lineage, he has no conscience. Often he refuses. Rid of this baggage, he imagines he can run faster! He gallops around, the little man, like an old nag after a lanyard in a corral… He does not know anything. He stands alone in the center of his transient life, between his father and his son, the extreme limits of his existence… I find this unacceptable, outrageous, incredible, heartbreaking. I remain convinced that the long chain remained solid and that it only began to loosen at the dawn of the modern world, when the men turned from the pursuit of truth to take care of the baloney.
— Jean Raspail, La hache des steppes, 1974
Since the fall, not merely of the hierarchic nature of society, but of almost all traditional forms, the consciously conservative man stands as it were in a vacuum. He stands alone in a world which, in its all opaque enslavement, boasts of being free, and, in all its crushing uniformity, boasts of being rich. It is screamed in his ears that humanity is continually developing upwards, that human nature, after developing for so and so many millions of years, has now undergone a decisive mutation, which will lead to its final victory over matter. The consciously conservative man stands alone amongst manifest drunks, is alone awake amongst sleep-walkers who take their dream for reality. From understanding and experience he knows that man, with all his passion for novelty, has remained fundamentally the same, for good or ill; the fundamental questions in human life have always remained the same; the answers to them have always been known, and, to the extent that they can be expressed in words, have been handed down from one generation to the next. The consciously conservative man is concerned with this inheritance.
— Titus Burckhardt
The regular act of applied science is to introduce into labor a labor-saving device or a machine. Whether this is benefit depends on how far it is advisable to save the labor. The philosophy of applied science is generally quite sure that the saving of labor is a pure gain, and that the more of it the better. This is to assume that labor is an evil, that only the end of labor the the material product is good. On this assumption labor becomes mercenary and servile, and it is no wonder if many forms of modern labor are accepted without resentment though they are evidently brutalizing. The act of labor as one of the happy functions of human life has been in effect abandoned, and is practiced solely for its rewards.
— The Southern Agrarians
If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.
— Lewis Mumford
In any society, order is the first need of all. Liberty and justice may be established only after order is tolerably secure. But the libertarians give primacy to an abstract liberty. Conservatives, knowing that ‘liberty inheres in some sensible object,’ are aware that true freedom can be found only within the framework of a social order, such as the constitutional order of these United States. In exalting an absolute and indefinable 'liberty’ at the expense of order, the libertarians imperil the very freedoms they praise.
― Russell Kirk
How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life. This is our modern danger—one of the waxen wings of flight. It may cause our civilization to fall unless we act quickly to counteract it, unless we realize that human character is more important than efficiency, that education consists of more than the mere accumulation of knowledge.
— Charles Lindbergh
None of the dogmas of modern science are immutable. Gigantic factories, office buildings rising to the sky, inhuman cities, industrial morals, faith in mass production, are not indispensable to civilization. Other modes of existence and of thought are possible. Culture without comfort, beauty without luxury, machines without enslaving factories, science with- out the worship of matter, would restore to man his intelligence, his moral sense, his virility, and lead him to the summit of his development.
— Alexis Carrel
Marriage is not an ordinary contract, since in terminating it, the two parties cannot return themselves to the same state they were in before entering into it. And if the contract is voluntary at the time it is entered into, it can no longer be voluntary, and almost never is, at the time of its termination, since the party which manifests the desire to dissolve it takes all liberty from the other party to refuse, and has only too many means to force its consent.
— Louis de Bonald, On Divorce
Above all, you must be rid of the hideous idea, fruit of a widespread inferiority complex, that pomp, on the proper occasions, has any connexion with vanity or self-conceit. A celebrant approaching the altar, a princess led out by a king to dance a minuet, a general officer on a ceremonial parade, a major-domo preceding the boar’s head at a Christmas feast—all these wear unusual clothes and move with calculated dignity. This does not mean that they are vain, but that they are obedient; they are obeying the hoc age which presides over every solemnity. The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender’s inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.
— C.S. Lewis
Technology does not fulfill man’s perennial dreams, but craftily mimics them.
— Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Men will learn eventually, and if they insist on rejecting the received wisdom of generations past, they do not thereby succeed at invalidating it; they merely condemn themselves to learning it, time and again, by ever grimmer experience.
— Introduction to
An Essay on the Restoration of Property by Hilaire Belloc, 1936
Science alone is untrue because it aims exclusively at truth—divorced from the good and the beautiful. The scientific mind is far too simple. There are too many facts in too mysterious a relationship for his simple mind—logical analytical as it is—to grasp. In theory he is right; in practice he can never get all the facts as long as he specializes exclusively in the nature of discursive reason. For knowledge—as distinct from wisdom and plastic form—of its very nature excludes all facts.
— Carl Schmitt, 1944
For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.
— C.S. Lewis
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
— G.K. Chesterton
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