Category Archives: Quotes

Two Quotes on Dying

They, who in matters of war seek in all ways to save their lives, are just they who, as a rule, die dishonorably; whereas they who, recognizing that death is the common lot and destiny of all men, strive hard to die nobly: these more frequently, as I observe, do after all attain to old age, or, at any rate, while life lasts, they spend their days more happily. This lesson let all lay to heart this day, for we are just at such a crisis of our fate. Now is the season to be brave ourselves, and to stimulate the rest by our example.

Xenophon, Anabasis

A man’s thoughts [when death draws near] seem to be double-powered, and the memory becomes very sharp and clear. I don’t know what was in the others’ minds, but I know what filled my own… I fancy it isn’t the men who get most out of the world and are always buoyant and cheerful that most fear to die. Rather it is the weak-engined souls who go about with dull eyes, that cling most fiercely to life. They have not the joy of being alive which is a kind of earnest of immortality … I know that my thoughts were chiefly about the jolly things that I had seen and done; not regret, but gratitude.

Dick Hannay in John Buchan’s Greenmantle

At first glance, these two quotes express the same thing, that those who cling to life never really live at all, and those who are willing to risk everything enjoy it all the more. But Hannay is able to trace his sentiment to a source that Xenophon (apparently) knew nothing of: gratitude.

I also love that phrase, an “earnest of immortality,” meaning, of course, a pledge or promise of things to come. The real joy of life comes in knowing there’s more life to come.

When I was in the process of conversion, it was, as it often is, terrifying. One of the things that was terrifying was that there was so much that I loved about being human—good fiction and music and intellectual adventures and experiencing nature and careful thinking—and I didn’t know how of all those human things would look in light of the Gospel, with all its urgency.

Susannah Black Roberts

Preparing for the Apocalypse

I knew an old couple that sat many evenings out on their porch. Sometimes both, sometimes one. They’d sit longer into the night than seemed reasonable, as if they were waiting for something that never came. It wasn’t until after the disaster that I believed I understood why.

Every subsequent evening, almost the entire street went, and sat, and talked, and shared, and played, for hours, around THEIR porch. Stubborn habit? Or had they just never forgotten a normal that everyone else briefly remembered?

Source

Using a Scythe

So great an art can only be learnt by continual practice; but this much is worth writing down, that, as in all good work, to know the thing with which you work is the core of the affair. Good verse is best written on good paper with an easy pen, not with a lump of coal on a whitewashed wall. The pen thinks for you; and so does the scythe mow for you if you treat it honourably and in a manner that makes it recognise its service.

Hilaire Belloc, Hills and the Sea

Before All Things Else

What distinguishes [the artist] here from the man who works to live is, I think, his desire to see the fulfilment of the work. Whether it is possible for a machine-worker to feel creatively about his routine job I do not know; but I suspect that it is, provided and so long as the worker eagerly desires that before all things else the work shall be done. What else causes the armaments worker to labour passionately when he knows that the existence of his country is threatened, but that his heart travels along the endless band with the machine parts and that his imagination beholds the fulfilment of the work in terms, not of money, but of the blazing gun itself, charged with his love and fear. As the author of Ecclesiasticus says, he “watches to finish the work”; for once, that is, he sees the end-product of his toil exactly as the artist always sees it, in a vision of Idea, Energy, and Power. It is unfortunate that so little effort should be made by Church or State to show him the works of peace in the same terms. Is the man, for example, engaged in the mass-production of lavatory cisterns encouraged to bring to his daily monotonous toil the vision splendid of an increasingly hygienic world? I doubt it; yet there is much merit in sanitary plumbing—more, if you come to think of it, than there is in warfare.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Work by the Standard of Eternity

That the eyes of all workers should behold the integrity of the work is the sole means to make that work good in itself and so good for mankind. This is only another way of saying that the work must be measured by the standard of eternity; or that it must be done for God first and foremost; or that the Energy must faithfully manifest forth the Idea; or, theologically, that the Son does the will of the Father.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Those With Ears to Hear

A passing hostile comment in the second-century pagan critic Celsus shows that the chants used in Christian worship (which he seems to have heard) were not only unusual to his pagan ears but so beautiful that he actually resented their emotive effect as an instrument for dulling the critical faculty.

Henry Chadwick, The Early Church

The Maturity of the Church

It is a paradoxical law of early liturgical study that the greater the biblical element in any given prayer the less primitive it is likely to be.

Henry Chadwick, The Early Church

On Trinitarian Art

If the creative artists had been called in to give evidence about the filioque clause, they must have come down heavily on the Western side of the controversy, since their experience leaves them in no doubt about the procession of the ghost from the son.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Frustrated

The Devil is the most discontented creature in the world. He is the proudest creature there is, and the most discontented creature, and the most dejected creature.

Jeremiah Burroughs