The Fiction of Tom Simon & the Lies of H. Smiggy McStudge
Quotations from all quarters on life, literature, and whatever else tickled my fancy. Browse and enjoy. —T. S.
Christopher Johnson explains Postmodernist ‘thought’ with unusual frankness and lucidity:
There’s a considerable difference between real and factual. Just because something is true doesn’t mean that it’s actually the case. And vice versa. Any educated person knows that.
In 1925, as a protest against the new and virulent strains of dictatorship then beginning to infect the world, Pope Pius XI instituted the Solemnity of Christ the King, which is now celebrated in the Novus Ordo Missae, and by many Protestant churches, on the last Sunday of the liturgical year, viz. today. This quotation caught my eye as appropriate to the occasion:
[T]he greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold; and hence great is the honour bestowed, not on him who kills a thief, but on him who kills a tyrant.
—Aristotle, Politics
When an acre of ground has produced long and well, we let it lie fallow and rest for a season; we take no man clear across the continent in the same coach he started in — the coach is stabled somewhere on the plains and its heated machinery allowed to cool for a few days; when a razor has seen long service and refuses to hold an edge, the barber lays it away for a few weeks, and the edge comes back of its own accord. We bestow thoughtful care upon inanimate objects, but none upon ourselves. What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!
—The Innocents Abroad
The difference between an economist and a politician is that the economist is sure that he doesn’t understand economics, and a politician is sure that he does.
The only thing I have to say against most modern poetry is that so much of it avoids all verse conventions without rising to the level of decent prose.
—Clive James
It is infantile to will an end without willing the means to that end.
Late in The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis treats us to a chestnut about progress:
It is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel at all.
The concluding half-paragraph of the book:
There are progressions in which the last step is sui generis — incommensurable with the others — and in which to go the whole way is to undo all the labour of your previous journey. To reduce the Tao to a mere natural product is a step of that kind. Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.
Recent Comments