Beyond Order Quotes

“Do not foolishly confuse “nice” with “good.””

“If you aim at nothing, you become plagued by everything.”

“Learn from the past. Or repeat its horrors, in imagination, endlessly.”

“Your life is, after all, mostly composed of what is repeated routinely.”

“Art bears the same relationship to society that the dream bears to mental life.”

“It is far better to become something than to remain anything but become nothing.”

“Like God, however, ideology is dead. The bloody excesses of the twentieth century killed it.”

“Romance requires trust—and the deeper the trust, the deeper the possibility for romance.”

“Much that is great starts small, ignorant, and useless. […] But today’s beginner is tomorrow’s master.”

“It was the bringing together of a warring multiplicity under the unifying doctrines of Christianity that civilized Europe.”

“There are three fundamental states of social being: tyranny (you do what I want), slavery (I do what you want), or negotiation.”

“To write something long, sophisticated, and coherent means, at least in part, to become more complex, articulate, and deeper in personality.”

“Although Christ commits many acts that might be considered revolutionary, as we discussed in Rule I, He is nonetheless explicitly portrayed in the Gospels as the master of tradition.”

“I have camped where the grizzly bears were plentiful. It is nice that they are on the planet and all that, but I prefer my grizzlies shy, not too hungry, and far enough away to be picturesque.”

“There is a high goal, a mountain peak, a star that shines in the darkness, beckoning above the horizon. Its mere existence gives you hope—and that is the meaning without which you cannot live.”

“I think it is reasonable to posit that it is often the people who have had too easy a time—who have been pampered and elevated falsely in their self-esteem—who adopt the role of victim and the mien of resentment.”

“That is the nature of our ancestors: immensely courageous hunters, defenders, shepherds, voyagers, inventors, warriors, and founders of cities and states. That is the father you could rescue; the ancestor you could become.”

“Those who break the rules ethically are those who have mastered them first and disciplined themselves to understand the necessity of those rules, and break them in keeping with the spirit rather than the letter of the law.”

“That ghostly figure, the ideal union of what is best in both personalities, should be constantly regarded as the ruler of the marriage—and, indeed, as something as close to divine as might be practically approached by fallible individuals.”

“This is the most profound of mysteries. What is that potential that confronts us? And what constitutes our strange ability to shape that possibility, and to make what is real and concrete from what begins, in some sense, as the merely imaginary?”