When religion doth with virtue join, it makes a hero like an angel shine.
To be conscious of gratitude is to acknowledge a gift.
Beauty, however, must here be understood in its original meaning: as the glow of the true and the good irradiating from every ordered state of being, and not in the patent significance of immediate sensual appeal.
Now the code of life of the High Middle Ages said something entirely opposite to this: that it was precisely lack of leisure, an inability to be at leisure, that went together with idleness; that the restlessness of work-for-work's sake arose from nothing other than idleness. There is a curious connection in the fact that the restlessness of a self-destructive work-fanatacism should take its rise from the absence of a will to accomplish something.
The eye of perfected friendship with God is aware of deeper dimensions of reality, to which the eyes of the average man and the average Christian are not yet opened.
The delight we take in our senses is an implicit desire to know the ultimate reason for things, the highest cause. The desire for wisdom that philosophy etymologically is is a desire for the highest or divine causes. Philosophy culminates in theology. All other knowledge contains the seeds of contemplation of the divine.
. . . each gratification points to the ultimate one, and that all happiness has some connection with eternal beatitude. Some connection, if only this: that every fulfillment this side of Heaven instantly reveals its inadequacy. It is immediately evident that such satisfactions are not enough; they are not what we have really sought; they cannot really satisfy us at all.
Sometimes you don't know if your memory is because you really experienced it or because you look at your old pictures. I have a nice picture of myself held up by my grandfather and my father standing next to me. We all have the same name - we're all called Anton Corbijn. That's something I cherish.
The truly great books are the few books that are over everybody's head all of the time.
Everything that we want is downstream. . . And you don't have even have to turn the boat and paddle downstream, just let go of the oars, the current will carry you.
That's progress: when we prove things wrong.