…for the village that can offer a happy community life, sustained by the people themselves, is able to hold its people.Charlotte Mason
Towards a Philosophy of Education, p.286

“Mr. Bennet, how can you abuse your own children in such a way? You take delight in vexing me. You have no compassion on my poor nerves.” “You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least.”Mr. & Mrs. Bennet
Pride & Prejudice

Yet, looking at you, the language of miracles
Seems exactly right; your tiny hands
Are so perfect, intricate instruments
Made for mending watches, typing,
Stitching rendered tissue, arranging
The material world in ways we call art;
Your head, so small, is nonetheless
The locus of a galaxy of cells into which ancient wisdom is already encoded;
That makes me think of miracles again…Alexander McCall Smith
On Looking at a Child, Time in Distance

We stand upon this grave of a once-proud city, and again feel a little envious of Demetrius, envious of the poetic world he lived in. How sad, how cruel, that this world should have been so completely destroyed; for was it not, perhaps, a better world than ours? We have radios and airplanes and motorcars, but Demetrius and Diomede, like most Greeks of that Golden Age in his-tory, had the time and the desire to love beauty, and to understand beauty, and to live for beauty. If Demetrius should return to earth today, would he be happy to remain here, or would he want to go back to the ghosts of ancient Greece as fast as he could? What do you think?Richard Halliburton
Book of Marvels, Halicarnassus

True love, unlike popular sentimental substitutes, is willing to suffer.Peter Kreeft
peterkreeft.com/topics/suffering.htm

Those who say that children must not be frightened may mean two things. They may mean (1) that we must not do anything likely to give the child those haunting, disabling, pathological fears against which ordinary courage is helpless: in fact, phobias. His mind must, if possible, be kept clear of things he can’t bear to think of. Or they may mean (2) that we must try to keep out of his mind the knowledge that he is born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil. If they mean the first I agree with them: but not if they mean the second. The second would indeed be to give children a false impression and feed them on escapism in the bad sense. There is something ludicrous in the idea of so educating a generation which is born to the Ogpu [State Police in the USSR] and the atomic bomb. Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. Nor do most of us find that violence and bloodshed, in a story, produce any haunting dread in the minds of children. As far as that goes, I side impenitently with the human race against the modern reformer. Let there be wicked kings and beheadings, battles and dungeons, giants and dragons, and let villains be soundly killed at the end of the book. Nothing will persuade me that this causes an ordinary child any kind or degree of fear beyond what it wants, and needs, to feel.C.S. Lewis
On Writing Children Stories

This is the way to make great men and not by petty efforts to form character in this direction or in that. Let us take it to ourselves that great character comes out of great thoughts, and that great thought must be initiated by great thinkers; then we shall have a definite aim in education.Charlotte Mason
Towards a Philosophy of Education, p.278

The transformation of the family is one of the greatest sociological phenomena of our time; it is a social question of the first importance, of far greater importance than any merely political or economic question can be.Theodore Roosevelt

There are those who believe that a new modernity demands a new morality. What they fail to consider is the harsh reality that there is no such thing as a new morality. There is only one morality. All else is immorality. There is only true Christian ethics over against which stands the whole of paganism. If we are to fulfill our great destiny as a people, then we must return to the old morality, the sole morality. All these blatant sham reformers, in the name of a new morality, preach the old, old vice and self-indulgence which rotted out first the moral fiber and then even the external greatness of Greece and Rome.Theodore Roosevelt

Progress has brought us both unbounded opportunities and unbridled difficulties. Thus the measure of our civilization will not be that we have done much, but what we have done with that much. I believe that the next half century will determine if we will advance the cause of Christian civilization or revert to the horrors of brutal paganism.Theodore Roosevelt

Our country is full of people who know things, and of children who want to learn things. A successful education system is one that brings the two together, so that knowledge can pass between them. In every village there are people with knowledge that would be useful to the young – retired accountants and lawyers, musicians and singers, those who speak a foreign language, writers, plumbers, farmers, engineers and amateur historians. And many of those would welcome the opportunity to teach what they know. Somehow we have failed to harness this capital, letting it go to waste while our children drift in search of it. Gradually our governments have begun to wake up to this fact. We are seeing a revival in government circles of the old idea of education as a charitable gift from one generation to the next, rather than a form of state-controlled social engineering.Roger Scruton
A Point of View, The Case for not leaving education to the teachers.

My own family, good book, a roaring fire, and a simple meal on the porch, now that is my idea of a bully social event.Theodore Roosevelt

My investigation of whether God had truly blessed India through the Bible yielded incredible discoveries: the university where I was studying, the municipality and democracy I lived in, the High Court behind my house and the legal system it represented, the modern Hindi that I spoke as my mother tongue, the secular newspaper for which I had begun to write, the army cantonment west of the road I lived on, the botanical garden to the east, the public library near our garden, the railway lines that intersected in my city, the medical system I depended on, the Agricultural Institute across town–all of these came to my city because some people took the Bible seriously.Vishal Mangalwadi
The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization

Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. … Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.Edmund Burke
Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790

If you remember what an author says, you have learned something from reading him. If what he says is true, you have even learned something about the world. But whether it is a fact about the book or a fact about the world that you have learned, you have gained nothing but information if you have exercised only your memory. You have not been enlightened. Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.Mortimer J. Adler
How to Read a Book

I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.C. S. Lewis
God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.C.S. Lewis

He who hath led will lead
All through the wilderness,
He who hath fed will surely feed. …
He who hath heard thy cry
Will never close His ear,
He who hath marked thy faintest sigh
Will not forget thy tear.
He loveth always, faileth never, So rest on Him today_-forever.Catherine (Amy’s mother) Carmichael

For Boethius, as for Cicero, there is a rational order that keeps the world in balance, keeping it from spinning out of control. It ensures that elements of different kinds bond properly to one another; it regulates how the seasons cycle in an ongoing carousel; this order also regulates how the stars and planets turn. He calls this cosmic order “music” because it is a deep, mathematical harmony that frames out the world in understandable patterns. What is more, Boethius (again like Cicero) taught that through instrumental music we can regain a “taste”of the musicality of the world, and thus retune our souls to cosmic music. Music is philosophical therapy, bringing the soul back into tune with the great Conductor’s universe.”Jason M. Baxter
The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis,

CAN YE? Mark 10:38.
Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?
And be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?

CAN GOD? Psalm 78:19.
Ye shall indeed… for with God all things are possible.

Now is my soul troubled and what shall I say?
Father, save me … Father, glorify Thy name.
For this cause came I unto this hour. John 12:24-28.Geraldine Guiness
A note to Amy Carmichael as she waited to head to China

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.C. S. Lewis
An Experiment in Criticism

“But the worst of all,” said the wife, “is that it teaches them to be idle, discontented and riotous, and madly to burn the very ricks of corn that might have made them bread.”Jane Haldimand Marcet
The Poor’s Rate