Book Review: The Life of J.-K. Huysmans by Robert Baldick
“Lord, you gave him great talent, and he used it for your glory. You gave him great suffering, and he accepted it for your blessing…”
– Abbé Fontaine
“Lord, you gave him great talent, and he used it for your glory. You gave him great suffering, and he accepted it for your blessing…”
– Abbé Fontaine
“Our major secret weapon is to deprive you of an enemy.”
– Georgi Arbatov
“Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
– William Shakespeare
“‘Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland’: this is the soundest counsel. But what is this flight? How are we to gain the open sea? For Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso — not content to linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense filling his days.
The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is The Father.”
– Plotinus
“The importance of these centuries…is not to be found in the external order they attempted to create, but in the internal change they brought about in the soul of Western man—a change which can never be entirely undone expect by the total negation or destruction of Western man himself.”
– Christopher Dawson
“Now it is God who is, for you and me, of a truth the ‘measure of all things,’ much more truly than, as they say, ‘man.’” – Plato
“For heroes have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breast a record unwritten with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the heart.”
– Pericles, “Funeral Oration”
“And every spirit that dissolveth Jesus, is not of God: and this is Antichrist, of whom you have heard that he cometh, and he is now already in the world.”
– 1 John 4:3
“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”
– Ephesians 5:11
The soul, the mind, needs food and exercise just as the body does; but the food of the mind is not bread, and its exercise is not games. It feeds on visions of truth and beauty as supplied by the master word artists in literature; its exercise is to wrestle with ideas enshrined in noble books, even as Jacob wrestled all the night with the angel; and its reward is, like Jacob’s, to receive a joyful blessing at the dawn.