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Orthodoxy Quotes

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Orthodoxy Quotes

“Whether Jesus turning water into wine - whether Mecca moving around following the feet of Nanak - whether Krishna lifting a mountain on his finger - it's all fiction - which were written not to inform the public but to make them accept a certain figure as the authority of their lives.”

“Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. ‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect." [I Stand With Charlie Hebdo, as We All Must (Wall Street Journal, January 7, 2015)]”

“He realised how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”

“Children need to exercise their freedom of choice while we are there to guide them. We must loosen the reins gradually as our children grow up. We should be prepared for moments when our children’s freedom causes us anguish—this anguish is akin to the compassionate suffering of God, who undertook the ”risk” of creation. Restraint of almost grown-up children is a cheap solution; it is easier, but less effective, than understanding and prayer. If a child has been brought up in the spirit of Christ, it will hardly ever be necessary.”

“The question for Christians who are already married and raising children is not: “How can I reduce to a bare minimum my family obligations so as to be ‘free’ to lead a ‘more spiritual’ life?” It is rather: “How should I nurture within my family life my love for God and my neighbor?”

“The same spiritual principle applies to all of us: are we not now ashamed of things from our own past which at the time never troubled our conscience? If our children only hear lectures about wearing this and that, and never hear about how we acquire the grace of God, what will inspire them to remain Orthodox? They will look elsewhere if they have a spiritual quest. We must see the hearts of our teenagers and not only the outward appearance, however outrageous we may find it.”

“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has always been the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as birds, but almost as butterflies. Remember how the most earnest medieval art was full of light and fluttering draperies, of quick and capering feet...In the old Christian pictures the sky over every figure is like a blue or gold parachute. Every figure seems ready to fly up and float about in the heavens. The tattered cloak of the beggar will bear him up like the rayed plumes of the angels. But the kings in their heavy gold and the proud in their robes of purple will all of their nature sink downwards, for pride cannot rise to levity or levitation. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness. A man "falls" into a brown study; he reaches up at a blue sky.”

“Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress. Heresy extends the hospitalities of the brain to a new thought. Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy, a coffin.”

“Science became important in this period because man, being set free from Orthodox tradition, turned his attention to the outer world. This attention to the outer world sometimes took forms which were notoriously pagan and immoral. But this worldly interest was also expressed in the rise of industry and capitalism and in the movement of exploration — discovery of America and so forth — these movements which were to change the face of the earth in future centuries. This one might speak of as the kind of leaven of worldliness which would penetrate the whole world and give the tone to today’s world which totally lacks the traditional Orthodox sense of the fear of God, and in fact is possessed by triviality. Protestantism is full of this tone which can be observed by looking at the behaviour of any Protestant minister to compare it with the behaviour of an Orthodox priest. The Catholic priest also has this same worldly tone, worldly spirit; and Orthodox priests who are losing the savour of Orthodoxy enter into this very same light-minded, jazzy, up-to-date feeling which is the influence of worldliness, which makes possible such a thing as Disneyland and those things which any sane person in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance and, above all, in traditional Christian civilization, would have regarded as some kind of madness.”

“If you are forgetful of the Lord, you will not pray, and without prayer the soul will not dwell in the love of God, for the grace of the Holy Spirit comes through prayer.”

“It is more practical to make people transform their mindset about religion and religiousness and walk in the path of creed-less religious harmony, than to convert the entire religious population on earth into atheists.”

“In the first place, what is liberalism, speaking generally, but an attack (whether mistaken or reasonable, is quite another question) upon the existing order of things? Is this so? Yes. Very well. Then my 'fact' consists in this, that Russian liberalism is not an attack upon the existing order of things, but an attack upon the very essence of things themselves--indeed, on the things themselves; not an attack on the Russian order of things, but on Russia itself. My Russian liberal goes so far as to reject Russia; that is, he hates and strikes his own mother. Every misfortune and mishap of the mother-country fills him with mirth, and even with ecstasy. He hates the national customs, Russian history, and everything. If he has a justification, it is that he does not know what he is doing, and believes that his hatred of Russia is the grandest and most profitable kind of liberalism. (You will often find a liberal who is applauded and esteemed by his fellows, but who is in reality the dreariest, blindest, dullest of conservatives, and is not aware of the fact.) This hatred for Russia has been mistaken by some of our 'Russian liberals' for sincere love of their country, and they boast that they see better than their neighbors what real love of one's country should consist in. But of late they have grown, more candid and are ashamed of the expression 'love of country,' and have annihilated the very spirit of the words as something injurious and petty and undignified. This is the truth, and I hold by it; but at the same time it is a phenomenon which has not been repeated at any other time or place; and therefore, though I hold to it as a fact, yet I recognize that it is an accidental phenomenon, and may likely enough pass away. There can be no such thing anywhere else as a liberal who really hates his country; and how is this fact to be explained among us? By my original statement that a Russian liberal is not a Russian liberal--that's the only explanation that I can see.”

“I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck...And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology.”

“Fight, fight and fight – all they do is fight – they don’t care about harmony or world peace, all they care about is to prove that they are right and others are wrong – the scientists, the philosophers, the preachers, the spiritualists – every single one of them (excluding the exceptions) just want to triumph over the other – and that’s precisely what’s wrong with this world – they all want victory to be their exclusive possession and defeat to be the possession of the others. This way, no amount of riches will ever bring happiness and harmony in this world, because to have happiness and harmony, we all must act together to rise triumphant as one species, and not as individuals or tiny groups.”

“I planted a rose bush and Stephen, age 2, asked, “Can I bless the rose?” I said yes and he did the sign of the cross over the rose bush. Then he turned to me and said, “Can I bless the hose?” And so he did.”

“When I asked Stephen, age two, for a kiss he would say, “I’ll give you a smooch.” He'd put his hands on each side of his face and pucker up, musing contentedly, “What kind shall I give her? […Grandma Joy’s ducky kisses, butterfly kisses, or….]”

“A jury is always a more orthodox body than any defendant brought before it; for blacks it is usually a whiter group, for poor people, a more prosperous group... Another lesson about the justice system: the way the judge charges the jury inevitably pushes them one way or the other, limits their independent judgment.”

“Unity in our world can never ever be imposed either intellectually, or politically or even scientifically for that matter - it can only rise from the insignia of humanity that lies dormant in the heart of every human - and once you break your shackles of all rigidity, that insignia will burn so bright that no corner of our society will remain untouched by it - it'll turn into an ever-burning torch and will light up the paths of humans all over the world, generation after generation.”

“I am the wind, when I flow among the Christians, I am Christian, when among the Muslims, I am Muslim, when among the Jews, I am Jew, when among the Hindus, I am Hindu, when among the Atheists, I am Atheist, but when among the fundamentalists, I am a purifying tornado.”

“It is all too easy, in the atmosphere of intellectual fog that pervades Liberal and Humanist circles today, to allow sympathy for an unfortunate person to pass over into receptivity to his ideas. The Nihilist, to be sure, is in some sense "sick," and his sickness is a testimony to the sickness of an age whose best--as well as worst--elements turn to Nihilism; but sickness is not cured, nor even properly diagnosed by "sympathy." In any case there is no such thing as an entirely "innocent victim.”