Food for Thought - Quotes

[mllevaleur]

This thread is a place to put any quotes that strike you or ring true, and to discuss them if you wish. I'm always impressed by writers who can sum up profound truths in so little words, or even if it's a longer quote, who are able to get to the heart of a matter so eloquently.

So jump on in, add your favorite quotes, or maybe something you just ran across today that made you pause.

[mllevaleur]

Here's one I just came upon, from one of my favorite authors, G.K. Chesterton:

"The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings." - "The New House" Alarms and Discursions

This quote so nicely encapsulates one of my biggest frustrations...extremism.

Having grown up among very strict fundamentalists, you can imagine I was exposed to my fair share of extreme thought and practice. As I grew older the extremism bothered me, and yet not enough to swing to the opposite end of the pendulum and throw out the baby with the bathwater, all the good I did learn I acknowledged and kept.

So it frustrates me when I see huge leaps from one extreme to another, usually in the form of a complete rejection of something without carefully considering if it is all worth rejecting or not. Then you end up with people on both extremes calling those in the middle "extremists" simply because they don't agree 100% with their ideas, and that's how I often feel, stuck in the middle!

[mllevaleur]

Ok so my love of Chesterton is showing, lol...I'm in the middle of reading Orthodoxy (which I highly recommend!) and I just love this quote on modern thought and philosophy:

But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert--himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt--the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.

We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own.