“The world will be saved through beauty.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky

“… once one has realized, following the great English literary visionaries William Shakespeare and Thomas Nashe, that sexual puritanism, political disciplinarianism, and abuse of the poor are the result of the refusal of true Christianity … one is led to articulate a more incarnate, more participatory, more aesthetic, more erotic, more socialized, even a more ‘Platonic’ Christianity.” – John Milbank

“Christian theology is a hair’s breadth away from nihilism.” – John Milbank

“Man is what he eats.” – Alexander Schmemann

“Academic theology is false.” – Alexander Schmemann

“It takes the whole church to know the whole truth.” – Rowan Williams

“We imagine the past, and remember the future.” – Carlos Fuentes

“The mind, unless it is pure and holy, cannot see God.” – Seneca

“The glory of God is the human being, fully alive.” – St. Ireneaus

“In the post-Christian world, all Christians will be mystics.” – Karl Rahner (loosely attributed)

“The depths of the self are the heights of God.” – James Finley

“Our social program begins with the dogma of the Holy Trinity.” – Nikolai Fyodorov

“The whole story of creation, incarnation, and our incorporation into the fellowship of Christ’s body tells us that God desires us, as if we were God, as if we were that unconditional response to God’s giving that God’s self makes in the life of the Trinity. We are created so that we may be caught up in this, so that we may grow into the wholehearted love of God by learning that God loves us as God loves God.” – Rowan Williams

“Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead.” Alisdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 3rd ed., 222).

“Experiences of the first order, of the first rank, are not realized through the eye.” – Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ.” – Martin Luther

“[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.” – Michel Foucault (quoted in Graham Ward, Cities of God, 17)

“Desire within the postmodern city can never come to an end – or the market would cease.” – Graham Ward

“The Bible gives no hint that a Christian “belief system” might be isolated from the life of the Church, subjected to scientific analysis, and have its truth compared with competing “belief systems.” – Peter Leithart

“Live as though you were dying every day….” St. Antony, according to Athanansius in his Life of St. Antony.

“In conformity with the philosophy of Christ, let us make of our life a training for death.” – Maximus the Confessor.

“Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.” – Paul Ricoeur (in The Symbolism of Evil).

“Our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and of our visible, sensible world.” – TS Eliot

“Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.” Terry Eagleton, _Literary Theory_ (2nd ed.) 179.

“The true way to worship the saints is to imitate their virtues, and they care more for this than for a hundred candles…. You venerate the bones of Paul laid away in a shrine, but not the mind of Paul, enshrined in his writings.” Erasmus, quoted in Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 72.

“He who fears hell runs toward it.” Luther, quoted in Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 75.

“… if one denies all hierarchy, all that remains is the hierarchy of money and brute force.” Unknown, quoted here: http://elizaphanian.blogspot.com/2007/07/radical-orthodoxy-official-twenty-four.html

“… facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention.” – Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice, Whose Rationality? (4th ed) 357.

“We no longer know, it is said, how to restore certain colors in the stained-glass windows of the cathedral at Chartres.” Josef Pieper.

“Man is emphatically self-made.” – Cardinal John Henry Newman, Grammar of Ascent (1979), 274.

“Our own self-awareness arises not in the Cartesian cogito, but in our finding ourselves in relation to other beings in whom we both actively recognize and do not recognize our own subjectivity, in an inexhaustible dialectic.” – John Milbank, The Word Made Strange, 125.

“Poetry is language trying to become bodily experience.” – Herbert McCabe.

“Neither for Augustine himself nor for any thinker in the Augustinian tradition is a true philosophy, distinct and separate from theology, even possible.” – A.H. Hilary.

“Morality which is no particular socity’s morality is to be found nowhere.” – Alasdair MacIntyre, postscript to 2nd ed. of After Virtue, p 266.

“What we call “nature” is merely one mode of the disclosure of the “supernatural,” and natural reason merely one mode of revelation, and philosophy merely one (feeble) mode of reason’s ascent into the light of God. Nowhere, not even in the sciences, does there exist a “purely natural” realm of knowledge. To encounter the world is to encounter its being, which is gratuitously imparted to it from beyond the sphere of natural causes, known within the medium of an intentional consciousness, irreducible to immanent processes, that grasps finite reality only by being oriented toward a horizon of transcendental ends (or, better, “divine names”). There is a seamless continuity between the sight of a rose and the mystic’s vision of God; the latter is in fact implicit in the former, and saturates it, and but for this supernatural surfeit nothing natural could come into thought.” – David Bentley Hart. 

“Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, ‘Abba, as far as I can a say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace, and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?’ The old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, ‘If you will, you can become all flame.’” – Joseph of Panephysis, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.