Fire and Knowledge

Could it be possible that since the greatest good is to be found in love, so is the greatest evil.

–Walker Percy, Lancelot, p. 139

The great gain was that I very soon became able to understand a great deal without (even mentally) translating it; I was beginning to think in Greek. That is the great Rubicon to cross in learning any language. Those in whom Greek word lives only while they are hunting for it in the lexicon, and who then substitute the English word for it, are not reading the Greek at all; they are only solving a puzzle.

–C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955), p. 141

Organs are made for action, not existence; they are made to work, not to be; and when they work well they can be well.

–Dr. Henry Hyde Salter, On Asthma (1864), cited in David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback, p. 96

We have no right to hope for a better world unless we make ourselves better men.

–Wendell Berry, “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam” in The Long-Legged House (1969), p. 74

It is important to acquire early in life the power of reading sense wherever you happen to be.

–C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955), p. 57

There is something worse than knowing the worst. It is not knowing.

–Walker Percy, Lancelot, p. 131

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit—not a fossil earth, but a living earth.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854), p. 255

It is the rule that when one has one’s money invested in a machine, one does not wish to see the machine stand idle; the idleness of the machine means economic ruin. The United States is now investing seventy per cent of its money in a war machine. This means, however reluctant we may be to admit it, that we have become a militarist society; we have a vested interest in war.

–Wendell Berry, “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam” in The Long-Legged House (1969), p. 72