- Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913—1994)

Believe in God, trust in Christ, look with suspicion.

Observing life is too interesting to waste time living it.

Depopulate and reforest—first civilizing rule.

The problem is not sexual repression, nor sexual liberation, but sex.

No beneficiary of slaves is supporter of birth control.

Modern society is abolishing prostitution through promiscuity.

The believer is superior to the nonbeliever because unbelief is a solution whereas faith is a problem.

Eugenics appals those who fear its judgment.

The correct use of freedom can consist in embracing a destiny, but my freedom consists in being able to refuse to do that.
The right to fail is an important right of man.

We live because we do not view ourselves with the same eyes with which everybody else views us.

Puritanism is the attitude that befits the decent man in the world today.

In the end, there is no area of the soul sex would not succeed in corrupting.

Sexual promiscuity is the tip society pays in order to appease its slaves.

Prayer is the only act in whose effectiveness I trust.

The two most pressing problems of the contemporary world: demographic expansion and genetic deterioration are unsolvable.
Liberal principles prevent the solution of the first, egalitarian ones that of the second.

The people with whom we speak every day and our favorite authors cannot belong to the same zoological species.

The recluse is humanity’s delegate to what is important.

It is not worth talking about even one erotic topic with someone who does not feel the unalterable baseness of erotism.

We spend a life trying to understand what a stranger understands at a glance: that we are just as insignificant as the rest.

The being one finds oneself to be is also in the end a stranger to us.

The modern world will not be punished.
It is the punishment.

The modern world demands that we approve what it should not even dare ask us to tolerate.

The democratization of eroticism has at least served to show us that virginity, chastity, purity, are not bitter and morbid old maids, as we believed, but silent vestals of a pure flame.

The price for absolute freedom is boundless vulgarity.

Prayer, war, tillage are manly occupations.

Man’s three enemies are: the devil, the state, and technology.

In spiritually arid centuries, the only man to realize that the century is dying from thirst is the man who still harnesses an underground spring.

Man’s full depravity does not become clear except in great urban agglomerations.

The sight of the modern world is so repugnant that ethical imperatives are becoming certainties in the indicative for us.

Time should be feared less because it kills than because it unmasks.

Perception of reality, today, dies crushed between modern work and modern entertainment.

Photography shows us how the imbecile views the world.

In a perfect penal code, vulgarity would be punished with the death penalty.

A motto for the young leftist: revolution and pussy.

Industrial society is the expression and fruit of souls in which virtues destined to serve usurp the place of virtues destined to command.

The anonymity of modern society obliges everyone to claim to be important.

Nations have two noble modes of existence—ascent or decadence—and one vulgar mode—prosperity.

For a society that lives among statistics, to suspect that each unit is a unique person with his own destiny turns out t o be troubling and alarming.

What Ludwig XIV. or Goethe did not require, for example, can serve us as a criterion for what is useless.

The racist errs by believing that pure races exist, the anti-racist by believing that the ingredients of a beverage are of no importance.

Modern society neglects man’s basic problems, since it barely has time to attend to those to which it gives rise.

The scent of the sin of pride attracts man like blood attracts a wild beast.

The only precaution is praying on time.

It is already possible for us to anticipate the combination of brothel, dungeon and circus the universe of tomorrow will have become if man does not succeed in resurrecting a medieval universe.

Death is the unequivocal sign of our dependence.
Our dependence is the unequivocal foundation of our hope.

In this century of threats and menaces nothing is more frivolous than to occupy oneself with serious matters.

Where Christianity disappears, greed, envy, and lust invent a thousand ideologies to justify themselves.

The line between intelligence and stupidity is a shifting line.

The Christian knows that Christianity will limp until the end of the world.

Man is important only if it is true that a God has died for him.

To want Christianity not to make absurd demands is to ask it to renounce the demands that move our heart.

Every burden soon oppresses us, if we do not have Jesus as our Cyrenean.

Let us try to turn the burden that weighs us down into a force that lifts us up to salvation.

An ethics that does not command us to renounce is a crime against the dignity to which we should aspire and against the happiness which we can obtain.

Humanity fell into modern history like an animal into a trap.

There are certain types of ignorance that enrich the mind and certain types of knowledge that impoverish it.

Just as in our society the dregs of society triumph, so too in our literature the dregs of the soul triumph.

Whoever does not agitate without rest in order to satisfy his greed always feels a little guilty in modern society.

The surest ways of winning are more disastrous than any defeat.

The invention is invented once for all times.
The idea must be reinvented each time.

It is not the origin of religions, or their cause, which requires explanation, but rather the cause and origin of their eclipse and neglect.

After experiencing what an age practically without religion consists of, Christianity is learning to write the history of paganism with respect and sympathy.

The mediocrity of any triumph does not deserve that we besmirch ourselves with the qualities it demands of us.

The soul becomes desiccated when it lives in a world that is almost exclusively manufactured.

Opinions, customs, institutions, cities—everything has become vulgar, since we gave up repairing the old in order to buy every day some gaudy novelty.

As the waters of this century rise, delicate and noble sentiments, sensuous and fine tastes, discreet and profound ideas take refuge in a few solitary souls, like the survivors of the flood on some silent mountain peaks.

To induce us to adopt them, stupid ideas adduce the immense public that shares them.

Whoever appeals to any science in order to justify his basic convictions inspires distrust of his honesty or his intelligence.

Even the enemy of technology denounces its public, but trivial, outrages more than its invisible, but disastrous, destructions.
(As if contemporary man’s feverish migration, for instance, were disturbing because of traffic accidents.)

The immigration of the peasant into the cities was less disastrous than that of the notable from the people. Rural society, on the one hand, lost the structure of prestige that used to discipline it, and the notable, on the other, was transformed into an anonymous particle of the amorphous human mass.

The metic’s fascinated imitation is the solvent of cultures.
A culture, in fact, does not perish by absorbing exotic elements, but rather by being assimilated and spread by foreign minds.

Fear is the secret engine of this century’s endeavors.

To be a Christian is to not be alone, no matter the solitude that surrounds us.

People more easily allow us to despise their serious occupations than their diversions.

I am the asylum of all the ideas displaced by modern ignominy.

Vulgarity consists as much in disrespecting what deserves respect as in respecting what does not deserve it.

When nothing in society deserves respect, we should fashion for ourselves in solitude new silent loyalties.

The celebrities of our time are permeated with the odor of the publicity laboratories where they are created.

The poor man does not envy the rich man for the opportunities for noble behavior which wealth facilitates, but rather for the degradations which wealth makes possible.

Serious books do not instruct, but rather demand explanations.

The modern mentality is the child of human pride puffed up by commercial advertising.

There are two kinds of men: those who believe in original sin and idiots.

To one who anxiously asks what is to be done today, let us honestly answer that today all that is possible is an impotent lucidity.

The key event of this century is the demographic explosion of idiotic ideas.

In the modern world the number of theories is increasing that are not worth the trouble to refute except with a shrug of the shoulders.

Wisdom, in this century, consists above all in knowing how to put up with vulgarity without becoming upset.

The curve of man’s knowledge of himself ascends until the 17th century, declines gradually afterwards, in this century it finally plummets.

A writer should know that only a few of those who look at him will actually see him.

Intelligent discussion should be limited to clarifying differences.

The intelligent man tends to fail because he does not dare to believe in the true extent of human stupidity.

All that is most excellent in history is a result of singularly unstable equilibriums.
Nothing endures for sure, but the mediocre lasts longer.

Who does not fear that the most trivial of his present moments will seem a lost paradise in years to come?

The price intelligence charges its chosen ones is resignation to daily banality.

What matters to nearly everyone is not being right, but that they be right.

Philosophies begin in philosophy and end in rhetoric.

Rhetoric does not win battles by itself, but no one wins battles without it.

By believing that the wax figures fabricated by psychology are alive, man has been gradually losing his knowledge of man.

The modern world obliges us to refute foolish ideas, instead of silencing the fools.

The reactionary’s objection is not discussed; it is disdained.

Whoever does not turn his back on the contemporary world dishonors himself.

The modern tragedy is not the tragedy of reason vanquished, but of reason triumphant.

Man hobbles through disappointments supported by small, trivial successes.

Modern society works feverishly to put vulgarity within everyone’s reach.

Grave problems never frighten the fool.
Those men who are disquieted, for example, by the qualitative deterioration of a society, make him laugh.

The technification of the world blunts one’s sensibility and does not refine one’s senses.

The soul becomes desiccated when it lives in a world that is almost exclusively manufactured.

One could object to science that it easily falls into the hands of imbeciles, if religion’s case were not just as serious.

Nothing makes more evident the reality of sin than the stench of souls that deny its existence.

If we believe in God we should not say, “I believe in God,” but rather, “God believes in me.”

Christianity is an impudence which we must not disguise as kindness.

Vulgarity consists, basically, in being on first name terms with Plato or Goethe. [Spanish: tutear/German: duzen]

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

A decent man is one who makes demands upon himself that the circumstances do not make upon him.

Faith is not a conviction we possess, but a conviction that possesses us.

Thought tends to be a response to an outrage rather than to a question.

The believer knows how to doubt; the unbeliever does not know how to believe.

Faith in God does not solve problems, but makes them laughable.
The serenity of the believer is not a presumption of knowledge, but a fullness of confidence.

To punish an idea, the gods condemn it to inspiring enthusiasm in the fool.

A nation does not “demystify” its past without impoverishing its present substance.

The fragments of the past that survive embarrass the modern landscape in which they stand out.

Genius is the capacity to make on our stiff, frozen imagination the impact that any book makes on a child’s imagination.

It is impossible to travel around and to be intelligent at the same time.
Intelligence is a matter of being able to sit still.

Literature does not die because nobody writes, but when everybody writes.

Capitalism is abominable because it achieves that disgusting prosperity promised in vain by the socialism that hates it.

Each new generation, in the last two centuries, ends up looking with nostalgia on that which appeared abominable to the previous generation.

One may reject a great man if in his stead one does not admire a mediocre one.

The ancient who denied pain, the modern who denies sin—they entangle themselves in identical sophisms.

“Civilizations are mortal” is the greatest comfort for someone alive today.

In this century of nomadic crowds profaning every illustrious place, the only homage a respectful pilgrim can render a venerable shrine is not to visit it.

Given the rapid obsolescence of everything in our age, man lives today in a psychologically briefer time.

A philosophy that avoids the problem of evil is a fairy tale for gullible children.

Modern man defends nothing energetically except his right to debauchery.

Adapting to the modern world demands the hardening of one’s sensibility and the debasing of one’s character.

I do not belong to a world that is passing away.
I prolong and transmit a truth that does not die.

Only because He commanded us to love men do the modern clergy resign themselves to believing in the divinity of Jesus; whereas, in truth, it is only because we believe in the divinity of Jesus that we resign ourselves to loving men.

The Church used to educate; the pedagogy of the modern world only instructs.

After the intelligent opinions have been excluded from the opinions of an age, what is left over is “public opinion.”

To discover the fool there is no better reagent than the word “medieval.”
He immediately sees red.

The cultural standard of an intelligent people sinks as its standard of living rises.

Man lives from the disorder of his heart and dies from the order which life establishes in it.

Very few carry themselves with the discretion befitting their insignificance.

Every foreign religion wavers between the diabolical and the ridiculous.

Modern society affords itself the luxury of letting everyone say what they want because today everybody thinks basically the same thing.

Today’s reactionary has a satisfaction which yesterday’s did not: to see modern programs end not only in disaster but also in ridicule.

The universe takes revenge on those who treat it as an inanimate mechanism by making them die not humiliated, but prosperous and brutish.

Why deceive ourselves? Science has not answered a single important question.

The heart does not rebel against the will of God, but against the “reasons” they dare attribute to it.

Triviality never lies in what is felt, but in what is said.

The two most insufferable types of rhetoric are religious rhetoric and the rhetoric of art criticism.

They have buried metaphysics so many times that it must be considered immortal.

It is above all against what the crowd proclaims to be “natural” that the noble soul rebels.

Once youth is past, chastity forms a part not so much of ethics as of good taste.

It turns out it is impossible to convince a businessman that a profitable activity can be immoral.

Everything that is physically possible soon seems morally plausible to modern man.

Man closes his eyes before the real problems, just as the commentator does before the real difficulties of the text.

The man who wants to avoid grotesque collapses should not look for anything to fulfill him in space and time.

Triviality is the price of communication.

To think like our contemporaries is the prescription for prosperity and for stupidity.

The self-important man’s lack of importance is sufficient revenge for us.

“The dignity of man,” “the greatness of man,” “the rights of man,” etc.: a verbal hemorrhage which the simple sight of our face in the morning as we shave should staunch.

Natural disasters devastate a region less effectively than the alliance of greed and technology.

Despair is the dark valley through which the soul ascends toward a universe no longer sullied by greed.

Everything can be sacrificed to the misery of the people.
Nothing should be sacrificed to its greed.

Artificially fomenting greed, in order to become rich by satisfying it, is the unforgiveable sin of capitalism.

It would be easier to resolve modern problems, if, for example, it were possible to sustain the Utopian fantasy that what causes the multiplication of plastic objects is only the manufacturer’s commercial greed, and not the idiotic admiration of the presumed buyers.

The businessman’s greed surprises me less than the seriousness with which he satisfies it.

Modern architecture knows how to erect industrial shacks, but it does not succeed in building either a palace or a temple.
This century will leave behind only the tire-tracks of the transports it employed in the service of our most sordid greed.

When individual greeds come together, we customarily christen them “noble popular aspirations.”

Spasms of injured vanity, or of greed trampled underfoot—democratic doctrines invent the evils they denounce in order to justify the good they proclaim.

The problem of increasing inflation could be solved, if the modern mentality did not put up insurmountable resistance against any attempt to restrain human greed.

The economic inflation at the end of this century is a moral phenomenon.
The result, and at the same time the punishment, of egalitarian greed.

What the economist calls the “inflation of costs” is an outbreak of greed.

Socialism makes use of greed and misery; capitalism makes use of greed and the vices.

When today they tell us that someone lacks personality, we know they are speaking of a simple, trustworthy, upright being.

Intellectual vulgarity depresses me more than bad news.

Of the book of the world, we know nothing but pages written in a language we do not understand.

What we discover as we age is not the vanity of everything, but of almost everything.

The world is not in such bad shape, considering the men who rule it.

What is “rational” consists in prolonging life, avoiding pain, satisfying the appetite for hunger and sex.
Only some such definition sheds any light on the discourse of the last centuries.

Culture lives from being a diversion and dies from being a profession.

The cultured man does not turn culture into a profession.

To feel capable of reading literary texts with the impartiality of a professor is to confess that literature has ceased to be pleasurable for us.

The threat of collective death is the only argument which shakes humanity’s complacency today.
Atomic death troubles it even more than its increasing degradation.

Our contemporaries denigrate the past so that they do not commit suicide out of shame and nostalgia.

We are fully convinced only by the idea that does not need arguments to convince us.

Thinking corrupts the imbecile.

Only the unattainable deserves to be desired, only the attainable sought.
He who seeks the unattainable goes mad, he who desires the attainable is degraded.

Even the farthest right of any right always seems too far to the left for me.

The taste of the masses is characterized not by their antipathy to the excellent, but by the passivity with which they enjoy equally the good, the mediocre, and the bad.
The masses do not have bad taste. They simply do not have taste.

The object of bad taste is manufactured where social prestige makes people acquire objects which give no pleasure to those who buy them.

Good taste that has been learned ends up being of worse taste than spontaneous bad taste.

The relativity of taste is an excuse adopted by ages that have bad taste.

The press always chooses what to praise with impeccably bad taste.

It is not just to reproach this century’s writers for their bad taste when the very notion of taste has perished.

True glory is the resonance of a name in the memory of imbeciles.

The left does not always kill, but it always lies.

This century is turning out to be an interesting spectacle not for what it does, but for what it undoes.

Whoever lives long years is present at the defeat of his cause.

Only he lives his life who observes it, thinks it, and says it; the rest let life live them.

Man is an animal that can be educated, provided he does not fall into the hands of progressive pedagogues.

Modern pedagogy neither cultivates nor educates; it merely transmits opinions.

Formal instruction does not cure foolishness; it arms it.

We should not conclude that everything is permitted, if God does not exist, but that nothing matters.
Permission ends up being laughable when what is permitted loses its meaning.

Not only in politics it is not worth listening to what they say.

Cultures dry out when their religious ingredients evaporate.

Modern man calls his ambition a duty.

To refute the new morality, all one needs to do is examine the faces of its aged devotees.

Religion did not arise out of the need to assure social solidarity, nor were cathedrals built to encourage tourism.

It is impossible to convince the fool that there are pleasures superior to those we share with the rest of the animals.

Good breeding seems like a fragrance from the 18th century that evaporated.

Where the customs and the laws permit everyone to aspire to everything, everyone lives a frustrated life, no matter what position he comes to occupy.

Let us be careful not to call accepting what degrades us without any resistance “accepting life.”

Nobody, nothing, in the end forgives.
Except Christ.

When it finishes its “ascent,” humanity will find tedium waiting for it, seated on the highest peak.

Resistance is futile when everything in the world is conspiring to destroy what we admire.
We are always left, however, with an incorruptible soul, so that we might contemplate, judge, and disdain.

Prophets, philosophers, politicians, all fail in the end.
But there is nothing more absurd than to write their history as a chain of defeats.
Every great man is a victory.

Modern man denies himself every metaphysical dimension and considers himself a mere object of science.
But he screams when they exterminate him as such.

Today, whoever does not shout is neither heard nor understood.

Yesterday we believed that it was sufficient to scorn what man achieves; today we know that we must also scorn what he desires.

By embracing the “modern mentality,” Christianity became a doctrine which it is not easy to respect, nor interesting to do so.

Once he settles down in the country he admires, the foreigner bastardizes exactly that which he admires.

Although it grieves the angelism of the democrat: one cannot build a civilisation with miserable biological material.

Geneva, the Geneva that Calvin reigns from his sickbed, the Geneva whose shadow extends from the pulpit of Knox to the hallways of the Vatican, the Geneva where a world was formed, had about 12.000 inhabitants in 1560.
The huge modern human masses are not only a problem, but superfluous.

One may grant man all kinds of freedoms except the freedom to dress himself and erect buildings.

During no era did man clothe himself as ugly as in our era where he is free to choose how to dress.
Man is only clothed by garbs or uniforms.

The modern machine becomes more complex every day, and every day modern man becomes more elemental.

The religious sensibility oppressed by the Church takes refuge in strange catacombs.

There is no spiritual victory which need not be won anew each day.

Man no longer knows how to invent anything that does not serve to kill better or to make the world a little more vulgar.

To live is modern man’s only value.
Even the modern hero does not die except in the name of life.

Love may have its erotic spring, but its autumn must remain chaste.
– Few notions are more embarrassing than a fifty-year old man copulating with a forty-year old woman.

The psychiatrist considers only vulgar behavior sane.

Knowing solves only subordinate problems, but learning protects against tedium.

Only the contemplation of the immediate saves us from tedium in this incomprehensible universe.

Man pays for the intoxication of liberation with the tedium of liberty.

It is enough for beauty to touch our tedium for our heart to be torn like silk between the hands of life.

Modern civilization would be committing suicide, if it were truly succeeding in educating man.

Recent generations move among the ruins of Western culture like a caravan of Japanese tourists among the ruins of Palmyra.

The “reasons” for faith are a source of unbelief.

Every Christian has been directly responsible for the hardening of some unbeliever’s heart.

“Religious instruction” appears at times to have been invented in order to counteract the religious effectiveness of the liturgy.

The world appears less alien to someone who acts than one’s own soul appears to someone who observes.

It is better to see what we admire insulted rather than used.

The most repulsive and grotesque spectacle is that of the superiority of a living professor over a dead genius.

In the contemporary world waiver is a gesture of decency.

Upon each person depends whether his soul, deprived of its many pretensions by the years, is revealed as bitter spite or as humble resignation.

The amateur whom the professionals allow onto the track often wins the race.

“To belong to a generation,” rather than a necessity, is a decision made by gregarious minds.

The first generation of reactionaries accumulated warnings, the second only accumulated predictions, the following generations continue accumulating proofs.

Modern man’s misfortune lies not in having to live a mediocre life, but in believing that he could live a life that is not mediocre.

An outlandish idea becomes ridiculous when several people share it.
Either one walks with everybody, or one walks alone.
One should never walk in a group.

The imbecile does not discover the radical misery of our condition except when he is sick, poor, or old.

That liberation of humanity whose praises the 19th century sang ended up being nothing more than international tourism.

How can anyone live who does not hope for miracles?

As long a party keeps the same name, its programs can change.

Modern man’s life oscillates between two poles: business and sex.

To liberate man is to subject him to greed and sex.

Sex does not solve even sexual problems.

Eroticism is the rabid recourse of souls and times that are in agony.

When the modern consciousness suspends its economic routines, it only oscillates between political anguish and sexual obsession.

A tenured professor only succeeds in embalming the ideas that are delivered to him.

We should not be frightened: what we admire does not die.
Nor be delighted: neither does what we detest.

Not all defeated men are decent, but all decent men end up being defeated.

Those who remove man’s chains free only an animal.

Humanity longs to free itself from poverty, from toil, from war—from everything which few escape without degrading themselves.

The temptation for the churchman is to carry the waters of religion in the sieve of theology.

Hierarchies are heavenly.
In Hell all are equal.

The reactionary longs to convince the majorities, the democrat to bribe them with the promise of others’ goods.

Swimming against the current is not idiotic if the waters are racing toward a waterfall.

Although we may have to yield to the torrent of collective stupidities dragging us along in its current, let us not allow ourselves to be dissolved in its mud.

When the dust raised by the great events of modern history settles, the mediocrity of the protagonists leaves the historian dumbfounded.

Democrats describe a past that never existed and predict a future that is never realized.

Democrats can be divided into those who believe wickedness is curable and those who deny it exists.

A partisan of equality who is not envious can only be so because he is stupid.

Our soul has a future.
Humanity has none.

Though he knows he cannot win, the reactionary has no desire to lie.

The majority of men have no right to give their opinion, but only to listen.

We cannot find shelter in the Gospel alone, as we also cannot take refuge in the seed of the oak tree, but rather next to the twisted trunk and under the disorder of the branches.

The arguments with which we justify our conduct are often dumber than our actual conduct.
It is more tolerable to watch men live than to hear them spout their opinions.

A little patience in dealing with a fool helps us avoid sacrificing our good manners to our convictions.

We are in the habit of calling moral improvement our failure to realize that we have switched vices.

We should ask the majority of people not to be sincere, but mute.

The steps of grace startle us like the steps of a passerby in the fog.

Nietzsche is merely rude; Hegel is blasphemous.

The people does not convert to the religion preached by a militant minority, but to the one imposed by a militant minority. Christianity and Islam knew it; Communism knows it.

The true religion is monastic, ascetic, authoritarian, hierarchical.

God does not ask for our “cooperation,” but for our humility.

Whoever merely resigns himself to his lot feels frustrated by a destiny without meaning.
Whoever humbly accepts it knows that he just does not understand the significance of the divine decision concerning him.

The genius who bemoans and laments himself forgets that he has spared himself the misfortune of mediocrity.

Posterity, that consolation of the artist, confines itself to a few ill-humoured scholars who are plagued by digestive problems.

In societies where the social position, instead of adhering to the person, constitutes merely a temporary commission, envy bursts out of the gate.
“La carriere ouverte aux talents” is the racetrack of envy.

Modern man deafens himself with music in order not to hear himself.

The historical importance of a man rarely corresponds to his intimate nature.
History is full of victorious morons.

The left’s theses are trains of thought that are carefully stopped before they reach the argument that demolishes them.

Unlike the Biblical archangel, Marxist archangels prevent man from escaping their paradises.

The ignoramus believes that the expression “aristocratic manners” signified insolent behavior; whoever investigates discovers that the expression signified courtesy, refinement, dignity.

There are vices of a fallen archangel and there are vices of the simple, infernal crowd.

When they die, aristocracies explode; democracies deflate.

The greater the importance of an intellectual activity, the more ridiculous the pretension in enhancing the competence of one who carries it out.
A dentistry degree is respectable, but a philosophy degree is grotesque.

An aristocratic society is one where the desire for personal perfection is the animating spirit of the social institutions.

To be an aristocrat is to not believe that everything depends on the will.

The 19th century did not live with more anguish because of its sexual repression than the 20th century with its sexual liberation.
Identical obsession, even when the symptoms are the opposite.

Wisdom comes down to not showing God how things should be done.

Not having gotten men to practice what she teaches, the contemporary Church has resolved to teach what they practice.

The Church, when she flung the doors wide open, wished to make it easier for those outside to enter, without thinking that she actually made it easier for those inside to leave.

Fools used to attack the Church; now they reform her.

To know an historical episode well consists in not observing it through democratic prejudices.

Sociology protects the sociologist from all contact with reality.

The ritualism of daily conversations mercifully hides from us just how basic the furnishings of the minds among which we live are.
To avoid any shocks, let us prevent our interlocutors from “elevating the debate.”

The evolution of Christian dogma is less evident than the evolution of Christian theology.
We Catholics with little theology believe, in the end, the same thing as the first slave who converted in Ephesus or Corinth.

The modern world is condemned precisely by all that with which modern man seeks to justify it.

That Christianity cures social diseases, as some say, or that, on the contrary, it poisons the society that adopts it, as others assert, are theses that interest the sociologist but are of no interest for a Christian.
A convert to Christianity has converted because he believes it is true.

To proclaim Christianity the “cradle of the modern world” is a grave accusation or a grave calumny.

The modern theologian’s pirouettes have not gained him one conversion more, nor one apostasy less.

I have seen philosophy gradually fade away between my skepticism and my faith.

Making us feel intelligent is how nature notifies us that we are saying something stupid.

History is less the evolution of humanity than the unfolding of facets of human nature.

Denying that a “human nature” exists is the ideological trick the optimist employs to defend himself against history.

Posterity is not the whole of future generations.
It is a small group of men with taste, a proper upbringing, and erudition, in each generation.

The only indices of civilization are the clarity, lucidity, order, good manners of everyday prose.

Whoever abandons himself to his instincts degrades his face as obviously as he degrades his soul.

Between the anarchy of instincts and the tyranny of norms there extends the fleeting and pure territory of human perfection.

If there existed a religious instinct, instead of religious experience, religion would lack importance.

Man emerges from the beast when he orders his instincts hierarchically.

Each suppressed taboo makes human existence recede toward the dullness of instinct.

The crowd calls no actions intelligent except actions of the intellect in the service of instinct.

The individual today rebels against immutable human nature so that he might refrain from amending his own correctable nature.

I listen to every homily with involuntary irony.
My religion, just like my philosophy, comes down to trusting in God.

Without canon law the Church would not have had her admirable institutional presence in history.
But the vices of Catholic theology stem from its propensity to treat theological problems with the mentality of a canon lawyer.

Modern man has no interior life: hardly even internal conflicts.

The true aristocrat is the man who has an interior life. Whatever his origin, his rank, or his fortune.

The unbeliever is dumbfounded that his arguments do not alarm the Catholic, forgetting that the Catholic is a vanquished unbeliever.
His objections are the foundations of our faith.

The theses that the Marxist “refutes” come back to life unscathed behind his back.

The greatest modern error is not to proclaim that God died, but to believe that the devil has died.

The devil reserves the temptations of the flesh for the most guileless; and he prefers to make the less ingenuous despair by depriving things of meaning.

Let us deceive no one: the devil can deliver the material goods he promises.

Sex and violence do not replace transcendence after it has been banished.
Not even the devil remains for the man who loses God.

In order to exploit man in peace, it is most convenient to reduce him first to sociological abstractions.

“Equality of opportunity” does not mean the possibility for all to be decent, but the right of all not to be decent.

The contemporary anthropologist, under democrats’ severe gaze, skips quickly over ethnic differences like over hot coals.

Sociological categories authorize us to move about in society without paying attention to each man’s irreplaceable individuality.
Sociology is the ideology of our indifference toward our neighbor.

Instead of looking for explanations for the fact of inequality, anthropologists should look for the explanation for the notion of equality.

Even between fanatical egalitarians, the briefest encounter reestablishes human inequalities.

To think against is more difficult than to act against.

Natural inequalities would make the democrat’s life bitter, if slander did not exist.

Men can be divided into those who make their life complicated to gain their soul and those who waste their soul to make their life easier.

Few people do not need circumstances to complicate their souls a little.

A Catholic should simplify his life and complicate his thought.

Civilizations are not made “avec des idées” but with good manners.

A fight between democratic sects temporarily distracts them from the dismantling of society.

When respect for tradition dies out, society, in its incessant desire to renew itself, consumes itself in a frenzy.

The absence of God does not clear the way for the tragic but for the sordid.

The modern clergy believe they can bring man closer to Christ by insisting on Christ’s humanity.
Thus forgetting that we do not trust in Christ because He is man, but because He is God.

Depravity always arouses the secret admiration of the imbecile.

We can resist the trivialization that is invading the world by resurrecting God as our rearguard.

Easy communications trivialize even what is urgent.

We cannot escape the triviality of existence through the gates, but rather only through the roofs.

One has to believe in God in order to ascribe meaning to things.

The Christian has nothing to lose in a catastrophe.

Man does not become educated through the knowledge of things but through the knowledge of man.

Nothing is more dangerous for faith than to frequent the company of believers.
The unbeliever restores our faith.

At the thought of the current Church (clergy, liturgy, theology), an old Catholic first becomes indignant, then astonished, and finally he just bursts out in laughter.

Degradation is the current price of brotherhood.

The current liturgy makes official the secular divorce between the clergy and the arts.

I would not live for even a fraction of a second if I stopped feeling the protection of God’s existence.

Marx may win battles, but Malthus will win the war.

So great is the distance between God and human intelligence that only an infantile theology is not puerile.

Progressive Christians painstakingly search through sociology manuals for material with which to fill lacunae in the Gospel.

If it is merely a matter of organizing an earthly paradise, curates are more than enough.
The devil will do.

Earth will never be a paradise, but it could perhaps be prevented from coming closer and closer to being a vulgar imitation of hell.

Error does not seed well except in the shadow of the truth.
Even the devil becomes bored and excuses himself from where Christianity is being extinguished.

Let us accept sociology as long as it classifies and does not seek to explain.

Those who wield a sociological vocabulary imagine they have understood because they have classified.

To appeal not to God, but to His justice, fatally leads us to place Him before the tribunal of our prejudices.

Demographic pressure makes people brutish.

The historian deals with history like an artist painting a portrait.
The sociologist like a policeman adding to his file.

Every phenomenon has its sociological explanation, always necessary and always insufficient.

The most interesting chapter of sociology is yet to be written: that which studies the bodily repercussions of social events.

To interpret certain men, sociology is enough.
Psychology is overkill.

When individuality withers, sociology flourishes.

A limited population produces fewer ordinary intelligences than a numerous population, but it can produce an equal or greater number of talents.
Great demographic densities are the breeding grounds of mediocrity.

An abrupt demographic expansion rejuvenates society and makes its stupidities recrudesce.

It is not from starvation that the spirit sometimes dies, but from satiety of trivialities.

The book that “today’s youth” adopts needs to do decades of penance to atone for the silly ideas it inspires.

Physiology on one side, sociology on another, signed the partition of psychology.
Personal life has been abolished, like the Polish Sejm.

Dreams of excellence do not deserve respect except when they do not disguise a vulgar appetite for superiority.

Lasting friendships usually require a shared laziness.

Rejection troubles us and approval confuses us.

The spectacle of injured vanity is grotesque when the vanity is another’s and repugnant when it is ours.

Not intelligence but vanity reproaches “intellectual isolation.”

A totalitarian state is the structure into which societies crystallize under demographic pressures.

Population growth disquiets the demographer only when he fears that it will impede economic progress or make it harder to feed the masses.
But that man needs solitude, that human proliferation produces cruel societies, that distance is required between men so that the spirit might breathe, does not interest him.
The quality of a man does not matter to him.

The growing difficulty of recruiting priests should embarrass humanity, not disquiet the Church.

The heresy that threatens the Church, in our time, is “worldliness.”

The reactionary’s ideal is not a paradisiacal society. It is a society similar to the society that existed in the peaceful intervals of the old European society, of Alteuropa, before the demographic, industrial, and democratic catastrophe.

Whoever dares to ask that the moment stop and time suspend its flight surrenders himself to God; whoever celebrates future harmonies sells himself to the devil.

The past is the source of poetry; the future is the arsenal of rhetoric.

The modern world resulted from the confluence of three independent causal series: the demographic expansion, democratic propaganda, the industrial revolution.

To the horrors of communism one must add that there is nothing else to read than the prose of leftist writers.

Humanity will one day solemnly recall the events that initiated the dismantlement of industrial society.

In the last corner of the labyrinth of the soul grunts a frightened ape.

The demands of honor increase with the rank of the obligations and soon seem extravagant to plebeian souls.

To lighten the load of the Christian ship foundering in modern waters, liberal theology yesterday jettisoned the divinity of Christ, and radical theology today jettisons the existence of God.

The tragedy of the left? To diagnose the disease correctly, but to aggravate it with its therapy.

Castaways more readily forgive the imprudent pilot who sinks the “ship” than the intelligent passenger who predicts its drift towards the reef.

The prophet who accurately foretells the growing corruption of a society is not believed, because the more that corruption grows, the less it is noticed by the corrupt.

The reactionary today is merely a traveler who suffers shipwreck with dignity.

The reformers of contemporary society persist in decorating the cabins of a ship that is going under.

Denigrating progress is too easy. I aspire to the professorship in methodical regression.

Leftists and rightists merely argue about who is to have possession of industrial society.
The reactionary longs for its death.

Reactionary texts appear obsolete to contemporaries and surprisingly relevant to posterity.

Even when we know that everything perishes, we should still construct our temporary shelters with granite.

Hope is not fatally stultifying, if we do not hope in a future with an upper-case F.
To cherish the hope of a new earthly splendor is not illicit, provided we hope in a splendor that is wounded, frail, mortal.
We can love what is of the earth without fault, as long as we remember that we love fleeting clay.

We should resign ourselves to the fact that nothing lasts, but refuse to hasten anything’s demise.

To write for posterity is not to worry whether they will read us tomorrow.
It is to aspire to a certain quality of writing.
Even when no one reads us.

Posterity is not going to understand what an achievement mere good sense is in this insane century.

The rapid evolution of a society destroys its customs.
And imposes on the individual, in place of the silent education of traditions, the reins and the whip of laws.

Men tend not to live on anything but the ground floor of their souls.

Nothing appears more obsolete to humanity during its drinking bouts than the truths it confesses again when it recovers its judgment.

The particular creature we love is never God’s rival. What ends in apostasy is the worship of man, the cult of humanity.

The preaching of progressives has so corrupted us that nobody believes that he is what he is, but only what he did not succeed in being.

Industrial society is condemned to forced perpetual progress.

Unable to achieve what it desires, “progress” christens what it achieves desire.

In order to avoid a manly confrontation with nothingness, man erects altars to progress.

“Progress,” “Democracy,” the “classless Society,” excite the crowd, but leave the Muses cold and disagreeable.

In the bosom of the Church today, “integralists” are those who do not understand that Christianity needs a new theology, and “progressives” are those who do not understand that the new theology must be Christian.

More than one presumed “theological problem” comes only from the lack of respect with which God treats our prejudices.

The religious problem grows worse each day because the faithful are not theologians and the theologians are not faithful.

Sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, are experts in generalities.
When confronted by the bull’s horns of a concrete case, they all look like Anglo-Saxon bullfighters.

Modern theologies tend to be the contortions of a theologian who is trying to avoid admitting his unbelief to himself.

A progressive defends Progress by saying that it exists.
The murderer also exists, and the judge condemns him.

Progress in the end comes down to stealing from man what ennobles him, in order to sell to him at a cheap price what degrades him.

The progressive clergy never disappoint an aficionado of the ridiculous.

At a certain profound level every accusation they make against us hits the mark.

The true reader clings to the text he reads like a shipwrecked man to a floating plank.

It is easier to forgive the progressive for progress than for his faith.

Tolerance consists of a firm decision to allow them to insult everything we seek to love and respect, as long as they do not threaten our material comforts.
Modern, liberal, democratic, progressive man, as long as they do not step on his calluses, will let them degrade his soul.

To maintain that “all ideas are respectable” is nothing but pompous nonsense.
Nevertheless, there is no opinion that the support of a sufficient number of imbeciles does not oblige one to put up with.
Let us not disguise our impotence as tolerance.

In order to convince our interlocutors, it is often necessary to invent contemptible, deceitful, ridiculous arguments.
Whoever respects his neighbor fails as an apostle.

Apostolate perverts in two ways: by inducing one either to mitigate in order to lull to sleep, or to exaggerate in order to arouse.

Let us not try to convince; apostolate harms good manners.

Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope in a miracle.

Depressing, like any optimistic text.

So that one does not live depressed among so many foolish opinions, it behooves one to remember at every moment that things obviously are what they are, no matter what the world’s opinion is.

’Renouncing the world’ ceases to be an achievement and becomes a temptation as Progress progresses.

Progress ages badly.
Each generation brings a new model of progressivism and discards with contempt the previous model.
Nothing is more grotesque than yesterday’s progressive.

Progress is the offspring of knowledge of nature.
Faith in progress is the offspring of ignorance of history.

Revolutions are not the locomotives but the derailments of history.

Humanity is not cured of its diseases except by means of catastrophes that decimate it.
Man has never known how to renounce at the right time.

Humanity is the only totally false god.

Revolutions are frightening, but election campaigns are disgusting.

Every non-conformist knows, in the depths of his soul, that the place his vanity rejects is the exact same place his nature has assigned him.

Reason, Progress, and Justice are the three theological virtues of the fool.

The progressive clergyman, in revolutionary periods, ends up dead, but not as a martyr.

The progressive’s cardinal syllogism is simply beautiful: the best always triumphs, because what triumphs is called the best.

When it comes to knowledge of man, there is no Christian (provided he is not a progressive Christian) whom anybody has anything to teach.

Capitalism is the vulgar side of the modern soul, socialism its tedious side.

Capitalism is the monstrous distortion of private property by liberal democracy.

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, the ineffable.

The progressive’s enthusiasm, the democrat’s arguments, the materialist’s demonstrations are the reactionary’s delicious and succulent food.

Unless what we write seems obsolete to modern man, immature to the adult, trivial to the serious man, we must start over.

Those who confess to us that they have doubts about the immortality of the soul appear to believe we have an interest in their soul being immortal.

The soul is a quantity which decreases as more individuals come together.

In society just as in the soul, when hierarchies abdicate the appetites rule.

Civilization is what is born when the soul does not surrender to its congenital vulgarity.

The higher part of ethics does not deal with moral behavior, but with the quality of the soul.

The secular importance of religion lies less in its influence on our conduct than on the noble sonority with which it enriches the soul.

Liturgical incense is the oxygen of the soul.

The devil does not gain mastery over the soul that knows how to smile.

Only the soul anchored in the past is not shipwrecked in night storms.

The most customary form of suicide in our time consists of firing a bullet into the soul.

There are people who admit, without shame, that they “study” literature.

The sciences, particularly the social sciences, are depositing successive strata of barbarisms on top of literature.

To think that only important things matter is the menace of barbarism.

The barbarian either totally mocks or totally worships.
Civilization is a smile that discreetly combines irony and respect.

There are two symmetrical forms of barbarism: peoples who have nothing but customs and peoples who respect nothing but laws.

The regions of the soul least understood are always the most densely populated.
The most daring explorers of the soul disembark in urban areas.

The soul is man’s task.

Superficial, like the sociological explanation of any behavior.

In the social sciences one generally weighs, counts, and measures, to avoid having to think.

There is no sociological generalization that does not appear inadequate to the man to whom it applies.

The sociologist never knows, when manipulating his statistics, where the relative figure matters and where the absolute figure matters.

The history of literary genres admits of sociological explanations.
The history of works of literature does not.

Educating the soul consists in teaching it to transform its envy into admiration.

In silent solitude only the soul capable of conquering in the most public disputes bears fruit.
The weakling begs for commotion.

Revolutions are more a subject for sociology than for history.
Manifestations of those depths of human nature that nothing educates, nothing civilizes, nothing ennobles, revolutions despoil man of his history and return him to bestial behaviors.

Upon finding himself perfectly free, the individual discovers that he has not been relieved of everything, but despoiled.

The alleged “laws of sociology” are more or less extensively documented historical facts.

Legal freedom of expression has grown alongside the sociological enslavement of thought.

Layers of imbecility deposit themselves in the soul like sediment over the years.

The psychologist dwells in the slums of the soul, just as the sociologist dwells on the outskirts of society.

Only churchmen’s hands knew, for a period of a few centuries, how to beautify conduct and the soul.

The soul grows full of weeds unless the intelligence inspects it daily like a diligent gardener.

Angels and demons both meet with disappointment at the deathbed of a thoroughly modern man in his death throes: they find barely any trace of the soul that evaporated years ago.

To have good taste is above all to know what we should reject.

The fool loses his hopes, never his illusions.

It has required a titanic effort to make the modern world so ugly.

After seeing work exploit and demolish the world, laziness seems like the mother of the virtues.

The fact that nothing in this world fulfills us does not prevent us from longing for a world that is less ignoble and less ugly.
In a well-tended garden the soul observes with nobler tranquility the initial onslaught of winter.

In no previous age did the arts and letters enjoy greater popularity than in ours. Arts and letters have invaded the school, the press, and the almanacs.
No other age, however, has produced such ugly objects, nor dreamed such coarse dreams, nor adopted such sordid ideas.
It is said that the public is better educated. But one does not notice.

Other ages may have been as vulgar as ours, but none had the extraordinary sounding board, the inexorable amplifier, of modern industry.

Not only the intellect, in some men the soul itself brays.

For the man who lives in the modern world it is not the soul’s immortality in which it is difficult to believe, but in its mere existence.

The tolling of a monastery bell penetrates into areas of the soul not reached by a sonorous voice.

Modern man imagines that it is sufficient to open the windows in order to cure the soul’s infection, that it is not necessary to clear out the trash.

Souls that Christianity does not prune never mature.

Skepticism does not mutilate faith; it prunes it.

We end up treating each other as fungible goods when we cease believing in the soul.

There is an illiteracy of the soul which no diploma cures.

To call obsolete what merely ceased to be intelligible is a vulgar error.

The periodic reflowering of what he decrees obsolete makes life bitter for the progressive.

The most persuasive reason to renounce daring progressive opinions is the inevitability with which sooner or later the fool finally adopts them.

In the intelligent man faith is the only remedy for anguish.
The fool is cured by “reason,” “progress,” alcohol, work.

The progressive believes that everything soon becomes obsolete, except his ideas.

To appreciate the ancient or the modern is easy; but to appreciate the obsolete is the triumph of authentic taste.

The democrat defends his convictions by declaring whoever attacks him obsolete.

A greater capacity for killing is the criterion of “progress” between two peoples or two epochs.

The only possible progress is the internal progress of each individual.
A process that concludes with the end of each life.

The Christian has a double duty: to fight for Christianity and to know that it will perish.

Serenity is the state of mind of one who has entrusted God, once and for all, with everything.

God is not an invention but a discovery.

The horror of progress can only be measured by someone who has known a landscape before and after progress has transformed it.

The failure of progress has not consisted in the non-fulfillment but in the fulfillment of its promises.

What is called progress are preparations for a catastrophe.

The progressive dreams of the scientific stabling of humanity.

In the end, what does modern man call “Progress”?
Whatever seems convenient to the fool.

It is indecent, and even obscene, to speak to man of “progress,” when every path winds its way up between funerary cypresses.

The cost of progress is calculated in fools.

Courtesy is an obstacle to progress.

The Gospels, in the hands of the progressive clergy, degenerate into a compilation of trivial ethical teachings.

God ends up being a parasite in souls where ethics predominates.

For the fool, obsolete opinion and erroneous opinion are synonymous expressions.

“Life” has so obviously become the highest goal of the modern world that whoever lives for something else — even if it’s eating — arouses our sympathy.

Optimisim is a pretty modern invention.
— Classical literature lacks this vulgar sentiment.

A high “intelligence quotient” is indication of distinguished mediocrity.

The cultural rickets of our time is a result of the industrialization of culture.

When he repudiates rites, man reduces himself to an animal that copulates and eats.

He who wants to have intelligent friends only risks to die alone.

The most serious charge against the modern world is its architecture.

Modern man destroys more when he constructs than when he destroys.

Man does not know what he destroys until after he has destroyed it.

Words are not enough for a civilization to be transmitted.
When its architectural landscape crumbles, a civilization’s soul deserts.

The word “humanity” in the mouth of a Catholic is a sign of apostasy, in the unbeliever’s a sign of coming bloodbaths.

Many people love man only so they can forget God with an easy conscience.

Modern man searches first of all for a religion that denies Grace.

Christianity is the religion of one who lives as if an earthquake were possible at any moment.

By saying that death is “natural” the last stupidity has been said.

When we invent a universal meaning for the world, we deprive of meaning even those fragments that do have meaning.

Dialogue perverts its participants.
Either they are obstinate out of a desire to fight, or they give in out of laziness.

The sincere dialogue ends in a quarrel.

With somebody who is ignorant of certain books no discussion is possible.

Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our postulates is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time.

Dialogue does not consist of intelligences discussing with each other but of vanities confronting each other.

Public political discussion is not intellectually adult in any country.

The only pellucid dialogue is one between two recluses.

When it comes to political matters, there are few who even in private do not argue at the level of a public meeting.

Dialogue with the imbecile poses difficulties: we never know where we harm him, when we scandalize him, [or] how we please him.

The philosophy of Schopenhauer does not necessarily exclude God. It just does not include Him.
God would be the goal of the will therein and the only nourishment that would satisfy it.

An “ideal society” would be the graveyard of human greatness.

Faith is not irrational approval of an assertion, but perception of a particular order of realities.

Modern man is ignorant of the positive quality of silence.
He does not know that there are many things of which one cannot speak without automatically disfiguring them.

Adults? Maybe there were only two: Thucydides and Burckhardt.

Where is the world headed?
Toward the same transcience from which it comes.

In light of the majority of people today, one prefers them to speak hostile of religion.

Only the recluse saves himself from provincialism.

The common man lives among phantasms; only the recluse moves among realities.

A man does not communicate with another man except when the one writes in his solitude and the other reads him in his own.
Conversations are either a diversion, a swindle, or a fencing match.

The inferior man is always right in an argument, because the superior man has condescended to argue.

Nothing obliges the man who only meditates to debate every fool who argues.

Let us not give stupid opinions the pleasure of scandalizing us.

Whoever insists on refuting idiotic arguments ends up doing so with stupid reasons.

Imbecility changes the subject in each age so that it is not recognized.

Contempt for “formalities” is a guarantee of imbecility.

Our denouncing the imbecile does not mean that we wish to get rid of him. We want diversity at any price.
But the charm of variety should not prevent us from judging correctly.

Where he is easy to refute, as in the natural sciences, the imbecile can be useful without being dangerous.
Where he is difficult to refute, as in the humanities, the imbecile is dangerous without being useful.

The true Catholic hides his faith. Not because he is ashamed of his faith, but so that it doesn’t feel ashamed of him.

Shows which are called technically “for adults” are not for adult minds.

The ability to consume pornography is the distinctive characteristic of the imbecile.

The most recent generations are particularly boring: believing in effect that they invented violence and sex, they copulate doctrinairely and doctrinairely kill.

It is fine to demand that the imbecile respect arts, letters, philosophy, the sciences, but let him respect them in silence.

Posterity is the small minority for whom the past is important.

The only alternative at the end of this century: eastern barracks—western brothel.

Slave of the machine is less the producer than the consumer.

God invented tools, the devil machines.

Modern man fears technology’s destructive capacity, when it is its constructive capacity that threatens him.

The great industrial trade fairs are the showcase of everything civilization does not require.

Reeducating man will consist of teaching him once again to value objects correctly: that is, to need few.

Most of the things man “needs” are not necessary to him.

The leftist is so worried about the problems of the 19th century that he does not worry about the problems of the 20th century.
The problems raised by the industrialization of society prevent him from seeing the problems raised by industrialized society.

In order to escape from this prison, one must learn not to come to an arrangement with its indisputable comforts.

Man never calculates the price of any comfort he gains.

We will soon reach the point where civilization declines with each additional comfort.

Bodies reside comfortably in the high-tech suites of a modern building, but souls have no other place to live than the ruins of an old building.

The growing number of people who consider the modern world “unacceptable” would comfort us, if we did not know that they are captives of the same convictions that made the modern world unacceptable.

Souls become vitiated when bodies make themselves too comfortable.

The man who invents a new machine invents for humanity a new concatenation of new forms of servitude.

To hope that the growing vulnerability of a world increasingly integrated by technology will not demand a total despotism is mere foolishness.

The impertinent attempt to justify “the ways of God to man” transforms God into a frustrated schoolmaster who invents educational games that are both cruel and childish.

When the theologian explains the reason for some act of God, the listener wavers between indignation and laughter.

Progress is the scourge God has chosen for us.

Civilized individuals are not products of a civilization, but its cause.

The forces that will ruin a civilization collaborate from its birth with the forces that construct it.

Every society is born with enemies who accompany it in silence until they ambush it at night and slit its throat.

Several civilizations were plundered because freedom inadvertently opened the gate to the enemy.

Courtesy allows us to respect our interlocutors without beliving in their importance.

Stoicism is definitively the cradle of all modern errors. (Divinization of man — determinism — natural law — egalitarianism — cosmopolitanism etc.)

Systematic reductions to single terms (pleasure and pain, self-interest, economics, sex, etc.) fabricate likenesses of intelligibility that seduce the ignorant.

The disappearance of the peasantry and of the classical humanities ruptured the continuity with the past.

To read nothing but Latin and Greek for a certain time is the only thing that desinfects the soul a little.

Someone who did not learn Latin and Greek goes through life convinced, even though he may deny it, that he is only semi-cultured.

The people were spiritually rich until the semi-educated decided to educate them.

It is not in the hands of popular majorities where power is most easily perverted; it is in the hands of the semi-educated.

To be a reactionary is to understand that man is a problem without a human solution.

Our last hope lies in the injustice of God.

When he is stripped of the Christian tunic and the classical toga, there is nothing left of the European but a pale-skinned barbarian.

The importance it attributes to man is the enigma of Christianity.

The city imagined by every utopian is always tacky—beginning with that of the Apocalypse.

What is difficult is not to believe in God, but to believe that we matter to Him.

Thomists and Marxists are able to exchange their personnel among each other.

Scholasticism sinned by seeking to turn the Christian into a know-it-all.
The Christian is a skeptic who trusts in Christ.

Even for Buddhist compassion, the individual is only a shadow that vanishes.
The dignity of the individual is a Christian cast made out of Greek clay.

Christianity, when it abolishes its ancient liturgical languages, degenerates into strange, uncouth sects.
Once contact is broken with Greek and Latin antiquity, once its medieval and patristic inheritance is lost, any simpleton turns into its exegete.

It is not primitive cults that discredit religion, but American sects.

Faith—any faith—is lost when it gets mixed up with the faithful.

Whoever wants to know what the serious objections to Christianity are should ask us.
The unbeliever makes only stupid objections.

Life is a daily struggle against one’s own stupidity.

Man is more capable of heroic acts than of decent gestures.

Familiarity, with persons or objects, is the only thing that does not become tiring.

Let us not expect the rebirth of civilization as long as man has not again learnt to feel humiliated when he devotes himself to economic tasks.

A non-economic problem does not appear worthy, in our time, of the attention of a serious citizen.

When the motive for a decision is not economic, modern man is bewildered and frightened.

Without economic concerns the fool dies from boredom.

The sinister uniformity that threatens us will not be imposed by a doctrine, but by a uniform economic and social conditioning.

Conservatism should not be a party but the normal attitude of every decent man.

Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give their opinions.

The ineptitude and folly of the bishops’ and popes’ chatter would disturb us, if we old Christians had not fortunately learned as little children to sleep during the sermon.

Fashion, even more than technology, is the cause of the modern world’s uniformity.

Those who replace the “letter” of Christianity with its “spirit” generally turn it into a load of socio-economic nonsense.

Rites preserve, sermons undermine faith.

A cloud of incense is worth a thousand sermons.

The primitive and medieval Church knew to incorporate that which was healthy.
The Tridentine Church knew to incorporate nothing.
Today’s Church only incorporates what’s poisonous.

That the history of the Church contains sinister chapters and idiotic chapters is obvious, but a manly Catholicism should not make its contrite confession by exalting the modern world.

“Escapism” is the imbecile’s favorite accusation to make.

The modern world bitterly censures those who “turn their back on life.”
As if it were possible to know with certainty that turning one’s back on life is not turning one’s face toward the light.

In every age there are two types of readers: the curious reader in search of novelties and the aficionado of literature.

A truthful, austere intellectual life grabs out of our hands art, literature, and the sciences, in order to prepare us to confront fate all alone.

All literature is contemporary for the reader who knows how to read.

The basic problems of an age have never been the theme of its great literary works.
Only ephemeral literature is an “expression of society.”

Without literary talent the historian inevitably falsifies history.

Countries with an impoverished literature have an insipid history.

Whoever stuffs his text full of idiomatic expressions creates linguistic folklore for literary tourists.

Modern criticism usually credits the author’s modest lineage to him as a literary merit.

A contemporary literary review never allows one to figure out whether the critic believes he lives among geniuses or whether he prefers not to have enemies.

To teach literature is to teach the pupil to believe that he admires what he does not admire.

Except in a few countries, trying to ‘promote culture’ while recommending the reading of ‘national authors’ is a contradictory endeavor.

Contemporary literature, in any period, is the worst enemy of culture. The reader’s limited time is wasted by reading a thousand mediocre books that blunt his critical sense and impair his literary sensibility.

To confer awards to mediocre writers is laughable, to great ones an impudence.

They call crowning mediocre men “promoting culture.”

Let us lament less the obscenity of today’s novelist than his misfortune.
When man becomes insignificant, copulation and defecation become important actions.

Monotonous, like obscenity.

It fell to this century to have the privilege of inventing the pedantry of obscenity.

Tongues of fire didn’t descend upon the Second Vatican Council, as they did upon the first assembly of the apostles, but a stream of fire—a Feuerbach.

The Church will need centuries of prayer and silence to forge anew its flabby soul.

What is thought against the Church, unless it is thought from within the Church, lacks interest.

The post-conciliar Church seeks to draw people into the “fold” by translating the commonplaces of contemporary journalism into the insipid jargon of the Vatican chancery.

The Christian knows with certainty what his personal behavior should be, but he can never state for certain that he is not making a mistake by adopting this or that social reform.

We should not believe in the theologian’s God except when He resembles the God called on in distress.

Nothing is more dangerous than to solve ephemeral problems with permanent solutions.

Let us not speak badly of nationalism.
Without the virulence of nationalism, Europe and the world would already be ruled by a technical, rational, uniform empire.
Let us give credit to nationalism for two centuries, at least, of spiritual spontaneity, of free expression of the national soul, of rich historical diversity.
Nationalism was the last spasm of the individual before the gray death awaiting it.

The modern Christian feels professionally obligated to act jovially and jokingly, to show his teeth in a cheerful grin, to profess a slavering friendliness, in order to prove to the unbeliever that Christianity is not a “somber” religion, a “pessimistic” doctrine, an “ascetic” morality.
The progressive Christian shakes our hand with the wide grin of a politician running for office.

Religion is the only serious thing, but one need not take seriously every declaration of homo religiosus.

Nothing makes clearer the limits of science than the scientist’s opinions about any topic that is not strictly related to his profession.

Even more boring than work is its eulogy.

Let us beware of discourse where the adjective “natural” without quotation marks abounds: somebody is deceiving himself, or wants to deceive us.
From natural borders to natural religion.

If one does not believe in God, the only honest alternative is vulgar utilitarianism.
The rest is rhetoric.

An atheist is respectable as long as he does not teach that the dignity of man is the basis of ethics and that love for humanity is the true religion.

One being alone can suffice for you.
But let it never be Man.

An intelligent book gives us the feeling to be intelligent, just as we feel like heroes when listening to military music. [Notas]

The trace Christianity leaves behind is the only guarantee for intellectual maturity. [Notas]

Nazism was in its explicit theses a dull doctrine, but it depended on subtle intellectual principles which were dense and rich.
Indication of an evidence that was utilized by crude hands. [Notas]

Maybe nothing has worried and embittered me so much like the fact that life apparently has no other purpose than life. [Notas]

Only the defeated come to possess sound ideas about the nature of things.

Lucidity is the booty of the defeated.

When he died, Christ did not leave behind documents, but disciples.

No city reveals its beauty as long as its daily torrent runs through it.
The absence of man is the final condition of the perfection of everything.

Evil, like the eyes, does not see itself.
May he tremble who sees himself as innocent.

The most notorious thing about every modern undertaking is the discrepancy between the immensity and complexity of the technical apparatus and the insignificance of the final product.

The professional never admits that in the science he practices insignificant truths abound.

Each one of a science’s successive orthodoxies appears to be the definitive truth to the disciple.

As stupid as a catechism may be, it is always less so than a personal confession of faith.

The soul surpasses the world, whereas the world encompasses humanity.
The insignificance of humanity renders “philosophies of history” ridiculous, whereas the infinite price of each human soul vindicates religion.

Those who prophesy more than indefinite cycles of decline and ascent are hiding some suspicious product they want to sell for cash.

“Current events” designates the sum total of what is insignificant.

As long as he is not so imprudent as to write, many a political man passes for intelligent.

The looks of the participants in candid photographs of revolutionary scenes seem half cretinous, half demented.

History relates what happened from above a certain level, but history happens below, in the common, the mediocre, the idiotic, the demented.

The most disastrous folly in letters is observance of the aesthetic rule of the day.

Sin ceases to seem like a fiction when we have been slapped in the face by its aesthetic vulgarity.

In the humanities the latest fashion is taken for the current state of the discipline.

The abuse of the printing press is due to the scientific method and the expressionist aesthetic.
To the former because it allows any mediocre person to write a correct and useless monograph, and to the latter because it legitimizes the effusions of any fool.

Man today oscillates between the sterile rigidity of the law and the vulgar disorder of instinct.
He knows nothing of discipline, courtesy, good taste.

I do not know whether, in another world, the devil punishes an irreligious society.
But I see that it is soon punished here by aesthetics.

The sentences handed down on the Day of Judgment will be less categorical and emphatic than those handed down by any journalist on any topic.

When the philosopher renounces leadership, the journalist puts himself in charge.

Journalism is the dispensation from intellectual discipline.

Clergymen and journalists have smeared the term “love” with so much sentimentality that even its echo stinks.

Journalism was the cradle of literary criticism.
The university is its tomb.

The three enemies of literature are: journalism, sociology, ethics.

It is not easy to discern whether contemporary journalism is a cynical way to get rich by corrupting man or a “cultural” apostolate carried out by hopelessly uncivilized minds.

A journalist is someone for whom it suffices, in order to speak about a book, to know of the book’s topic only what the book he is speaking about says.

The journalist arrogates to himself the importance of what he reports on.

The cultural propaganda of the last decades (scholarly, journalistic, etc.) has not educated the public; it has merely obtained the result, like so many a missionary, that the natives celebrate their ceremonies in secret.

In a hierarchical society imagination’s force is disciplined and does not unhinge the individual as it does in a democratic society.

Not the man who has disciplined only his intelligence is cultivated, but rather the man who also disciplines the movements of his soul and even the gestures of his hands.

The grandiloquence of theories of aesthetics increases with the mediocrity of the works, like that of orators with the decadence of their country.

“Social justice” is the term used to claim anything to which we do not have a right.

The act of despoiling an individual of his goods is called robbery, when another individual does the despoiling.
And social justice, when an entire collective entity robs him.

Any rule is preferable to caprice.
The soul without discipline disintegrates into the ugliness of a larva.

Discipline, order, hierarchy, are aesthetic values.

Discipline is not so much a social necessity as an aesthetic obligation.

Ethics should be the aesthetics of conduct.

Aesthetic pleasure is the supreme criterion for well-born souls.

Precision in philosophy is a false elegance.
On the other hand, literary precision is the foundation of aesthetic achievement.

The society that does not discipline attitudes and gestures renounces social aesthetics.

The newspaper allots the modern citizen his morning stultification, the radio his afternoon stultification, the television his evening stultification.

The newspaper collects the previous day’s garbage in order to feed it to us for breakfast.

A constant flow of news invades existence today, destroying the silence and peace of humble lives, without abolishing their tedium.

Reading the newspaper degrades whomever it does not make into a brute.

A writer’s biographers tend to eliminate the person in order to occupy themselves with his insignificant life.

Sad like a biography.

The day is made up of its moments of silence.
The rest is lost time.

Reading is an unsurpassable drug, because more than just the mediocrity of our lives, it allows us to escape the mediocrity of our souls.

Superficiality consists, basically, in hatred of the contradictions of life.

The majority of properly modern customs would be crimes in an authentically civilized society.

The modern metropolis is not a city; it is a disease.

Even small-town grudges are more civilized than the mutual indifference of big cities.

Today the individual must gradually reconstruct inside himself the civilized universe that is disappearing around him.

The intellectual irritates the civilized man, just as the adolescent irritates the adult, not because of the audacity of his bright ideas but because of the triviality of his arrogance.

The lucidity of certain moments is accompanied at times by the sensation of keeping watch alone in a sleeping city.

The egalitarian considers courtesy a confession of inferiority.
Among egalitarians rudeness marks rank.

A noble society is one where obeying and exercising authority are ethical behaviors, and not mere practical necessities.

A noble society does not wait for catastrophes to discipline it before it disciplines itself.

Perhaps religious practices do not improve ethical behavior, but they do without question improve manners.

The anonymity of the modern city is as intolerable as the familiarity of modern customs.
Life should resemble a salon of people with good manners, where all know each other but where none hug each other.

Civilization is what old men manage to salvage from the onslaught of young idealists.

The most precise and shortest definition of a true civilization has been given by Trevelyan: A leisured class with large and learned libraries in their country seats.

The victims of the most serious individual and social catastrophes are often not even aware: individuals become brutish, societies become degraded, unawares.

Individuals, in modern society, are each day more similar to one another and each day more estranged from one another.
Identical monads clashing with each other with ferocious individualism.

The plethora of objects in the midst of which we live has made us insensible to the quality, to the texture, to the individuality, of the object.

The city is disappearing while the entire world is becoming urbanized.
A city, in the West, was a person.
Today, overexpansion and state centralism are disintegrating it into a mere inanimate heap of housing.

There are fewer ambitious individuals in the world today than individuals who believe they are morally obliged to be ambitious.

Humanizing humanity again will not be an easy task after this long orgy of divinity.

Until man rouses himself from his current orgy of pride, it is not worth the trouble attempting anything.
Only looks not thrown out of focus by pride attain that lucid vision of the world which confirms what we preach.

Nations or individuals—with rare exceptions—only behave themselves decently when circumstances do not allow for anything else.

Modern man no longer dares to preach that the individual is born as a blank slate.
Too many mishaps have taught him that we are the oppressed heirs of our family, our race, our blood.
Blood is not an innocent liquid, but the viscous paste of history.

The individual declares himself a member of some collective entity, with the aim of demanding in its name what he is ashamed to claim in his own name.

To disrespect individuality is the object of education.
Forgetting such an obvious truth has led, in part, to modern depravity.

For the trunk of individuality to grow, one must prevent freedom from making the trunk spread out into branches.

Frustration is the distinctive psychological characteristic of democratic society.
Where all may legitimately aspire to the summit, the entire pyramid is an accumulation of frustrated individuals.

With the appearance of “rational” relations among individuals the process of a society’s decay begins.

The irreplaceability of the individual is the teaching of Christianity and the postulate of historiography.

Because we know that God cares about the individual, let us not forget that He seems to care little about humanity.

For God there are only individuals.

Only for God are we irreplaceable.

Communication between men becomes difficult when ranks disappear.
Individuals do not extend their hands to each other when walking in a crowd, but rather elbow each other.

The individual who lies to himself, just like the society that does not lie to itself, soon rots and dies.

Let us respect the two poles of man: concrete individual, human spirit.
But not the middle zone of an animal with opinions.

Man ends up being motivated by the motives which they say he has. A beast if they say that his soul dies with the souls of beasts; an animal with shame, at least, if they say that he has an immortal soul.

On the wide-open steppe the individual finds no protection against the inclemency of nature, nor in egalitarian society against the inclemency of man.

The psychological mechanism of the individual “without prejudices” lacks interest.

The individual does not search for his identity except when he despairs of his quality.

Individualism is not the antithesis of totalitarianism but a condition of it.

Totalitarianism and hierarchy, on the other hand, are terminal positions of contrary movements.

Liberalism proclaims the right of the individual to degrade oneself, provided one’s degradation does not impede the degradation of one’s neighbor.

Liberal ideas are likeable.
Their consequences ruinous.

A man is called a liberal if he does not understand that he is sacrificing liberty except when it is too late to save it.

Today’s conservatives are nothing more than liberals who have been ill-treated by democracy.

Modern liberalism no longer defends any of the “rights of man” except the right to consume.

Liberalism has not fought for the freedom, but for the irresponsibility, of the press.

To find oneself at the mercy of the people’s whims, thanks to universal suffrage, is what liberalism calls the guarantee of freedom.

Individualism proclaims differences but promotes similarities.

By overcoming the notion of cyclical history, Christianity did not discover the meaning of history; it merely emphasized the irreplaceable importance of the irreplaceable individual.

The American is not intolerable because he believes he is important individually, but because he possesses, insofar as he is an American, the solution to every problem.

The two poles are the individual and God; the two antagonists are God and Man.

Where even the last vestige of feudal ties disappears, the increasing social isolation of the individual and his increasing helplessness fuse him into a totalitarian mass.

Individualism is the cradle of vulgarity.

A “revolutionary” today means an individual for whom modern vulgarity is not triumphing quickly enough.

Each individual calls “culture” the collection of things he regards with respectful boredom.

We should respect the eminent individual whom the people respect, even when he does not deserve it, in order not to disrespect the notion of respect.

The individual seeks out the heat of the crowd, in this century, to protect himself against the cold emanating from the corpse of the world.

Doctrinaire individualism is dangerous not because it produces individuals, but because it suppresses them.
The product of the doctrinaire individualism of the 19th century is the mass man of the 20th century.

Every individual with “ideals” is a potential murderer.

A just society would be lacking in interest.
The discrepancy between the individual and the position he occupies is what makes history interesting.

Individuals interest the modern historian less than their circumstances.
A reflection of the current confusion: the way of life matters more than the quality of the one who lives.

Individualism degenerates into the beatification of caprice.

An individual’s efficiency is less a virtue than a threat to his neighbors.

Common life is so miserable that the most unfortunate man can be the victim of a neighbor’s envy.

Professional worshipers of man believe they are authorized to scorn their fellow man.
The defense of human dignity allows them to be boors toward their neighbor.

Concerning himself intensely with his neighbor’s condition allows the Christian to dissimulate to himself his doubts about the divinity of Christ and the existence of God.
Charity can be the most subtle form of apostasy.

In order to live peacefully with one’s neighbor, there is nothing better than not having a single postulate in common.

Listening to one’s neighbor is one of the most tiresome works of mercy.

The history of neither a people nor an individual is intelligible to us if we do not acknowledge that the individual’s or the people’s soul can die without either the people or the individual dying.

The idea of “the free development of personality” seems admirable as long as one does not meet an individual whose personality has developed freely.

Perhaps individually men are our neighbors, but massed together they are surely not.

There is no individual who, upon evaluating himself without previous preparation, does not find that he is inferior to many, superior to few, equal to none.

Education consists not in cooperating in the free development of the individual, but in appealing to the decency we all possess against the perversity we all possess.

The fervor of the homage which the democrat renders to humanity is comparable only to the coldness with which he disrespects the individual.
The reactionary disdains man, without meeting an individual he scorns.

Nobody will ever induce me to absolve human nature because I know myself.

False elegance is preferable to genuine vulgarity.
The man who dwells in an imaginary palace demands more from himself than the man who is happy with his hovel.

The contemporary Church prefers to practice an electoral Catholicism.
It prefers the enthusiasm of great crowds to individual conversions.

Educating the individual consists in teaching him to distrust the ideas that occur to him.

Individuals or nations have distinct virtues and identical defects.
Baseness is our common patrimony.

An individual’s culture is the sum total of intellectual or artistic objects that bring him pleasure.

The terms which the philosopher invents to express himself, and which the people eventually use as worn out metaphors, pass through an intermediate stage when the semi-educated employ them, with pedantic emphasis, in order to feign thoughts they do not have.

The dissemination of culture has had the effect of enabling the fool to chatter about what he does not know.

The bourgeoisie is any group of individuals dissatisfied with what they have and satisfied with what they are.

By the same measure that the state grows, the individual shrinks.

Sociological categories authorize us to move about in society without paying attention to each man’s irreplaceable individuality.
Sociology is the ideology of our indifference toward our neighbor.

Modern individualism is nothing but claiming as one’s own the opinions everyone shares.

Sincerity corrupts, simultaneously, good manners and good taste.

Sincerity, unless it is in a sacramental confession, is a factor leading to demoralization.

Political activity ceases to tempt the intelligent writer, when he finally understands that there is no intelligent text that will succeed in ousting even a small-town mayor.

Let us take care not to disrespect the man who possesses the stupidity necessary for the correct functioning of institutions.

A soul is cultured if in it the din of the living does not drown out the music of the dead.

To be civilized is to be able to criticize what we believe in without ceasing to believe in it.

What we believe unites or divides us less than how we believe it.

Anguish over the decline of civilization is the affliction of a reactionary.
The democrat cannot lament the disappearance of something of which he is ignorant.

The left is a collection of those who blame society for nature’s shabby treatment of them.

There are two equally erroneous attitudes toward Marxism: disdaining what it teaches, believing what it promises.

I understand that Communism which is a protest, but not that which is a hope.

Against the lowliness of the tasks which life assigns him nobody protests as loudly as the man who is incapable of carrying out any others.

Each day it becomes easier to know what we ought to despise: what modern man admires and journalism praises.

More so than the immorality of the contemporary world, it is its growing ugliness that moves one to dream of a cloister.

Ethical conduct is the aesthetically satisfactory conduct.

In the dismal and suffocating building of the world, the cloister is the space open to the sun and to the air.

There are no ideas that expand the intelligence, but there are ideas that shrink it.

For the myth of a past golden age, present day humanity today has substituted the myth of a future plastic age.

Nothing is more irritating than the certainty with which a man who has had success in one thing gives his opinion on everything.

With good humor and pessimism it is not possible to be either wrong or bored.

The modern theologian longs to transform Christian doctrine into a simple ideology of community behavior.

Religious individualism forgets the neighbor; communitarianism forgets God.
The more serious error is always the latter.

The future form of the verb is the imbecile’s favorite tense.

The enemies of the modern world, in the 19th century, could trust in the future.
In this century there only remains bare nostalgia for the past.

Two hundred years ago it was permissible to trust in the future without being totally stupid.
But today, who can believe in the current prophecies, since we are yesterday’s splendid future?

More repulsive than the future which progressives unintentionally prepare is the future they dream of.

The Church was able to baptize medieval society because it was a society of sinners, but her future is not promising in modern society, where everyone believes he is innocent.

The so highly acclaimed ‘dominion of man over nature’ turned out to be merely an enormous capability to kill.

The succession of generations is the vehicle, but not the motor of history.

‘Nature’ was a pre-Romantic discovery which Romanticism propagated, and which technology is killing in our days.

Until the end of the 18th century, what man added to nature increased its beauty.
Since then, what he adds destroys it.

Solitude is the laboratory where commonplaces are verified.

Solitude teaches us to be more intellectually honest, but it induces us to be less intellectually courteous.

In solitude man recovers strength to live.

The most dispiriting [kind of] solitude is not one lacking in neighbors, but one deserted by God.

The longer nature delays in avenging the offenses committed against her, the crueler her vengeance.

An age is civilized if it does not reserve intelligence for professional work.

The biblical prophet is not an augur of the future, but a witness to the presence of God in history.

The Bible is not the voice of God, but of the man who encounters Him.

There are no more old people, only decrepit youths.

Modern society is proceeding simultaneously to become inhospitable to the old and to multiply their number by prolonging their lives.

Let us not complain of the soil in which we were born, but rather of the plant we are.

In its desire to gain the upper hand over democratic humanitarianism, modern Catholicism summarizes the two great commandments of the Gospel thus: You shall love your neighbor above all things.

If dignity does not suffice to recommend modesty, vanity should.

An extreme ambition protects us against vanity.

It is easier to be compassionate than it is not to feel envy.

Nobody is innocent of what he does, nor of what he believes.

The only antidote to envy, in vulgar souls, is the conceit of believing that they have nothing to envy.

Public opinion today is not the sum of personal opinions.
Personal opinions, on the contrary, are the echo of public opinion.

To mature is to see increase the number of things about which it seems grotesque to give an opinion, for or against.

Man tends toward superficiality like a cork floats to the surface.

In order to make the technician devote all his attention to his job, industrial society, without disfiguring his skull, compresses his brain.

The arts flourish in societies that view them with indifference, and perish when the devout reverence of fools encourages them.

The will is granted to man so that he can refuse to do certain things.

The reactionary does not yearn for the futile restoration of the past, but for the improbable rupture of the future with this sordid present.

The only man who thanks life for what it gives him is the man who does not expect everything from life.

An irreligious society cannot endure the truth of the human condition.
It prefers a lie, no matter how idiotic it may be.

Art is the most dangerous reactionary ferment in a democratic, industrial, and progressive society.

Whereas contemporaries read only the optimist with enthusiasm, posterity rereads the pessimist with admiration.

Modern man believes he lives amidst a pluralism of opinions, when what prevails today is a stifling unanimity.

Man today does not live in space and time.
But in geometry and chronometers.

In every historical situation there always arises somebody to defend in the name of liberty, humanity, or justice, the stupid opinion.

A fight between democratic sects temporarily distracts them from the dismantling of society.

The true Christian should not resign himself to the inevitable: he should trust in the impertinence of a repeated prayer.

The modern mentality’s conceptual pollution of the world is more serious than contemporary industry’s pollution of the environment.

Only God and the central point of my consciousness are not accidental to me.

— Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913—1994)