Holding an instrument in your hand that has been shaped and worn by an individual that lived a hundred years prior to your existence is like traveling through time and shaking hands with an unknown friend. MR

Dostoevsky quotes, shamelessly gathered from Anastasia's favorite quotes.

"The darker the night, the brighter the stars,
The deeper the grief, the closer is God!"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

"It is not the brains that matter most, but that which guides them — the character, the heart, generous qualities, progressive ideas."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment)

Rober Louis Stevenson

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.

Theodore Roosevelt

To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

--Will and Ariel Durant

Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and aesthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. Aldo Leopold

Idustrialism would never take the time to ask whether something was ethically and aesthetically correct; time is money and money always trumps both ethics and aesthetics. MR

Nathaniel Hawthorne

There is so much wretchedness in the world, that we may safely take the word of any mortal professing to need our assistance; and, even should we be deceived, still the good to ourselves resulting from a kind act is worth more than the trifle by which we purchase it.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

Abraham Kyper

“ No single piece of our mental world is to be
hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is
not a square inch in the whole domain of our human
existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all,
does not cry: ‘Mine!’”

Aldo Leopold

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

History flows on a current of consequences derived
from philosophical thought. You may deny or ignore the
constant current, but if there is not a proper understanding of its ethos,
you may well become nothing more than a
droplet of water in a cataract fall. MR

There is an emptiness in consumption
A repulsion in glut. MR

Nature does not point to chance but to an artist of the highest order.

Turretin

God cannot be wrested from nature without totally confusing and destroying it. Nature proves the being of God. Since she proclaims that she not only is, but is from another and could not be without another. For if it is certain and indubitable that out of nothing, nothing is made and nothing can be the cause of itself, it is also certain that we must grant some first and unproduced being from whom all things are, but who is himself from no one.

Absolutes are not the cause of the woes experienced by the human race, (whether corporate or personal); absolutes are what enables us to identify what is immoral and then hopefully we attempt to bring about change.

Tolerance does not lead to a more just culture; it only looks the other way in the face of great evil.

Those who claim that moral absolutes do not exist are using borrowed capitol to support their position and thus are without support.

Poe

   The breeze, the breath of God, is still,
     And the mist upon the hill
     Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken,
     Is a symbol and a token.
     How it hangs upon the trees,
     A mystery of mysteries!

I'll Take My Stand

Industrialism is the economic organization of the collective American society. It means the decision of society to invest its economic resources in the applied sciences. But the word science has acquired a certain sanctitude. It is out of order to quarrel with science in the abstract, or even with the applied sciences when their applications are made subject of criticism and intelligence. The capitalization of the applied sciences has now become extravagant and uncritical; it has enslaved our human energies to a degree now clearly felt to be burdensome. The apologists of industrialism do not like to meet this charge directly; so they often take refuge in saying that they are devoted to simple science. They are really devoted to the applied sciences and to practical production. Therefore it is necessary to employ a certain skepticism even at the expense of the Cult of Science, and to say, it is an Americanism, which looks innocent and disinterested, but is not either.

Faith and reason are not to be viewed as antithetical to each other. Blind faith is as stated, lacking any reason and not worthy to be followed, despite any personal intuitions or emotions. But faith can be reasonable, it can complete reason and bring our reason into harmony with something larger than ourselves. Lacking faith can produce shallowness, bitterness and despondency.

Leonardo da Vinci

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

Plotinus

the Absolute "has its center everywhere and its circumference nowhere" Plotinus


An interesting thought but the its needs to be personified.

Henri-Frederic Amiel

"The great artist is the simplifier.

"The man who has no refuge in himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly a personality at all. He floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions--such a man is a mere article of furniture--a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being--an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air at rest, and the weathercock the humble servant of the air in motion.

"The highest function of the teacher consists not so much in imparting knowledge as in stimulating the pupil in its love and pursuit. To know how to suggest is the art of teaching."

In the world of technology, which is a creation of man, it is not the Creator whom one first encounters; rather man encounters only himself.

- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Syllogism

1. Whenever technology does not humanize it dehumanizes (diminishes man). 2. Whatever diminishes man diminishes his capacity to receive God. 3. Therefore bad technology is spiritually alienating and destructive to the soul. Dan Nicoles

I am not sure if the first proposition is completly true; could not the technology be neutral?
But I would most heartedly agree that any technology that becomes an impediment to serving or receiving God is bad technology and that would account for much of our current technology.

Wendell Berry

Listen to carrion -- put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.

“I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one’s neighbor-such is my idea of happiness. And then, on top of all that, you for a mate, and children, perhaps-what more can the heart of man desire?”

---from "Family Happiness" by Leo Tolstoy

Wendell Berry

Throughout the five-hundred years since Columbus’s first landfall in the Bahamas, the evangelist has walked beside the conqueror and the merchant, too often blandly assuming that his cause was the same as theirs. … The certified Christian seems just as likely as anyone else to join the military-industrial conspiracy to murder Creation

Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.
R.W.E.

Picture of a Factory Village 1833

For liberty our fathers' fought
Which with their blood, they dearly bought,
The factory System sets at nought.
A slave at morn, a slave at eve,
It dothe my inmost feelings grieve;
The blood runs chilly from my heart,
To see fair Liberty depart;
And leave the wretches in their chains,
To feed a vampire from their veins.
Britain's curse is now our own;
Enough to damn a King and Throne.

Thomas Mann

John Ruskin

You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.



He sees in the universal desire to make money … the great and fatal evil of the times, and rebels entirely against all the complex social and political arrangements which have been constituted into a system to that end. He holds that to rely on manufactures for greatness is to lean upon a broken reed, and that England must live upon herself through agriculture if ever she would return to a healthy condition of existence … By those who have not bowed the knee to the modern Baal he will be gratefully remembered as one preaching in the wilderness the abandonment of the grosser things of life and the realisation of the Ideal.”