Fire and Knowledge

Here’s a tip I’ve never used: I understand you can learn a great deal about girldom by reading Pride and Prejudice, and I own a copy, but I have never read it. I tried. It was given to me by a girl with a little note inside that read: What is in this book is the heart of a woman. I am sure the heart of a woman is pure and lovely, but the first chapter of said heart is hopelessly boring. Nobody dies at all. I keep the book on my shelf because girls come into my room, sit on my couch, and eye the books on the adjacent shelf. You have a copy of Pride and Prejudice, they exclaim in a gentle sigh and smile. Yes, I say. I do.

–Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality (2003), p. 140

In a highly child-centered society, where above all “attention must be paid” to children, friendship cannot hope to compete.

–Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 65

Everywhere, every day, local life is being discomforted, disrupted, endangered, or destroyed by powerful people who live, or who are privileged to think they live, beyond the bad effects of their bad work.

A powerful class of itinerant professional vandals is now pillaging the country and laying it waste. Their vandalism is not called by that name because of its enormous profitability (to some) and the grandeur of its scale. If one wrecks a private home, that is vandalism, but if, to build a nuclear power plant, one destroys good farmland, disrupts a local community, and jeopardizes lives, home, and properties within an area of several thousand square mile, that is industrial progress.

–Wendell Berry, “Higher Education and Home Defense” in Home Economics (1987), p. 50

I don’t think any church has ever been relevant to culture, to the human struggle, unless it believed in Jesus and the power of His gospel. If the supposed new church believes in trendy music and cool Web pages, then it is not relevant to culture either. It is just another tool of Satan to get people to be passionate about nothing.

–Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality (2003), p. 111

Cicero says, truly, that “most people unreasonably … want such a friend as they are unable to be themselves, and expect from their friends what they do not themselves give.”

–Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 63

As our present economy shows, the small can survive only if the great are restrained. And there is nothing undemocratic or anti-libertarian about restraining them. To assume that ordinary citizens can compete successfully with people of wealth and corporations, as our government presently tends to do, is simply to abandon the ordinary citizens. Restraint by taxation is the smallest, most obvious, simplest, and cheapest answer.

–Wendell Berry, “Margins” in The Unsettling of America (1972), p. 220

Our “behavior” will not be changed long with self-discipline, but fall in love and a human will accomplish what he never thought possible.

–Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality (2003), p. 79

“However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.”

–La Rochefoucauld, quoted by Joseph Epstein, Friendship (2006), p. 55