Looking at Bucharest churches in the warm March sunshine

Martin Harris was without his family this weekend and as they do not share his love of looking round churches that meant it was beholden on us to look at some. It was also extremely good weather - Martin's car (clever car) said it was 21°.

When I was a boy looking at a beautiful church was the present I most wanted for birthdays and it still is. The highlight of today's tour was the church of Sfintii Apostoli, the Holy Apostles, one of the few Bucharest churches that I have visited fairly often. (It's a ten minute stroll from my flat). It was moved on rollers by the Communists and hidden behind apartment blocks; thank God a clever engineer had the idea of the rollers and thereby saved a number of fine churches. But it was the highlight because Martin pointed out 'There is Santa Claus's hand!' and there indeed was St Nicholas's mummified hand. It is not in a very  prominent place and I had previously not noticed it.

Is there a black market for stolen holy relics? If so, they should guard it carefully. Stealing holy relics sounds very mediaeval but so do lots of things that happen in this country, which, I suppose, is why I love this place.

Mihai, our cicerone, who once told me that he is not particularly religious, is quite certain that this is indeed St. Nicholas's hand and that someone tried to steal the relic from the church and died in prison on December 6, St. Nicholas's Day. I would like to believe that St Nicholas was involved in this death, and in fact can at a stretch, but I very much doubted if it really was the saint's hand and said I would look up how many of his hands are to be found in churches in Europe. Yet now I am loathe to do so. Let us leave it that it is the saint's hand indeed. But, just as many towns claimed the honour of producing Homer, so relics of St Nicholas are widely distributed - click here.

Schitul Darvari. An oasis of calm. Rebuilt 1933, beautiful frescoes from that period. Once under Mount Athos but no more.

It was my idea to go to the wonderful Radu Voda.

In dreams, unfamiliar buildings turn up in familiar landscapes and I, like many people, quite often dream of churches.  It was dreamlike when Mihai took me last year to the wonderful church of Radu Voda, as large, old and beautiful as the Patriarchal Cathedral and yet a church whose existence I had never suspected. I had even seem it a number of times from afar and convinced myself it was the cathedral.

Radu Voda, impersonating the Patriarchal Cathedral

The Bucur church, oldest church foundation in Bucharest but not the oldest church.  A christening was going on - of a girl, which meant the congregation crowded at the door making entrance impossible. With boys the immersion takes place near the sanctuary.

The Church of the Holy Apostles, founded by Matei Basarab in 1636, was closed for renovation, a word that always strikes fear. The doorway is from 1636.

The Mihai Voda church. This one was moved on rollers 300 yards to save it from demolition under Ceausescu's urban plan. 

Smoking in Romanian restaurants

I am very sorry for people who smoke and strongly wish they would stop, but seeing people smoke in Romanian restaurants makes me happy to live in a free, civilised country. How many bad things are going to be visited on Romania in years to come, thanks to the EU. At the moment, to quote William Buckley's stirring clarion call, Romania is standing athwart history yelling stop.

When one sees ashtrays in cafés one knows one is one of the last bastions of freedom and respect for property rights in Europe. Who would have thought in 1989 that Romania would soon be far freer than England but it is, by miles.

By the way, smoking is no pleasure at all, none, a vice as pleasureless as avarice. Tobacco is the perfect industry for psychopaths and I wonder how many work in it. I know a female psychopath in a senior job (she never smoked) who loves the fact that the tobacco company she works for kills millions of people. It gives every day a savage zest for her which is in some way linked to sex.

Bucharest is the most interesting city in Europe even now

Bucharest is the most interesting city in Europe even now, despite the satanic malls.

Another great picture which could be of almost anywhere in the town (for it is more a town than a city despite its two million inhabitants):



I walk past this every day - there are so many scenes like this. When I tell Romanians that being in Bucharest makes me happy each day they think I am crazy or am lying and am here for the girls (who are very handsome).



Bucharest has been so cleaned and tidied up in the fifteen years I have lived here that I forget how sui generis it still is. These pictures bring that out. Paradoxically, and everything in Romania is a paradox, Bucharest is utterly uncool and yet the coolest place there is.

A film noir city.Where people still smoke in restaurants (Romania is still a free country) and where there are still femmes fatales (legions of them). Men here are men and women are women and everyone is happy about this. The most interesting city in Europe. You could almost say it is the last European city. 

Books read and films seen this year of grace 2012

The High Window*, Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye*, Raymond Chandler
Muhammad, Karen Armstrong
Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor 
Defying Hitler, Sebastian Hafner
Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler’s Capital 1939-45, Roger Moorehouse
This Business of Living: Diaries 1925-50*, Cesare Pavese
Relapse into Bondage, Alexandru Cretianu
Friends and Heroes*, Olivia Manning
Waugh in Abyssinia, Evelyn Waugh - I reviewed it here

As You Like It*, William Shakespeare
History of the Roumanians*, R.W.Seton-Watson 
A History of Romania, Kurt Treptow

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, Victor Sebestyen

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi - Geoff Dyer
In Ethiopia with a Mule, Dervla Murphy - I reviewed it here
Tippu Tip: The Story of His Career in Zanzibar and Central Africa, Heinrich Brode
First Footsteps in East Africa, Richard Burton
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, Ryszard Kapuscinski - I reviewed it here
Here is New York, E. B. White
The Psychopath's Bible*, Christopher Hyatt
Remote People, Evelyn Waugh 

The Diary of Terror: Ethiopia 1974-1991, Dawit Shifaw 
Solitude*, Anthony Storr
Pagans and Christians Robin Lane Fox - I reviewed it here
The Shadow of the Sword. Tom Holland - I reviewed it here.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon.
The Early Church*, Henry Chadwick

Bold means I loved it. An asterisk means I have read it before. 

What a masculine, middle-aged list. I am even reading military history, which is the last refuge of the middle-aged male. In fact I tried Beevor's Stalingrad on a recommendation from an aesthete friend but it bored and repelled me. Gibbon though is great.

I read Chandler for the prose style not for the plot, though he is a good storyteller. I thought when 14 that The Long Goodbye was too long and too much trying to be a proper novel. Now I absolutely loved it except the ending with the silly twist which I merely skimmed without attempting to understand it.

Karen Armstrong on Muhammad is not worth reading as she does not mention that the evidence for her subject's life is extremely late indeed (two centuries after the event).

Hafner's book, to my great surprise, an account of his uneventful life in Berlin in 1933, found among his papers and published ten years ago, is absolutely wonderful. It is beautifully written and deeply horrifying because of the sheer normality of his life as he describes it in Berlin in 1933 and the ease and rapidity with which Germans accepted Nazism and Nazi indoctrination. I hope it becomes a classic and is read in a hundred years' time as it deserves to be. People follow like sheep. I saw a somewhat faint parallel with another totalitarian ideology with a whiff of sulphur, political correctness, which has made cowards of us all in recent years. 



The Moorehouse book is not particularly well written or strikingly insightful, but it efficiently covers the ground. The story of Stella Kübler, the beautiful blonde Jewess who was used by the Nazis as bait to uncover Jews hiding in Berlin, chilled my blood. She was told that, by her collaborating, her parents would be saved, but unsurprisingly they were sent to the gas chambers anyway. She herself lived to an old age before she committed suicide. One solitary Jew was permitted to survive in the Jewish cemetery burying Jews according to Jewish practice. He was still alive when the Russians came. 

This is what a friend of mine calls Hitler porn but my excuse is that I know very little about German domestic history during the Nazi period, the subject is important and I am interested in biographies of cities, writing as I am one a book on Bucharest. 

Olivia Manning's third volume in the Balkan trilogy, set in Greece, which I reread while spending the weekend in Athens and Hydra, inclines me to think that the reason I like the first two so much is because of my love of and interest in Romania not Manning's writing. She does not create characters. Her characters are clearly drawn from life in many cases and therefore do not come alive. It is the invented ones like Yaki who live. 

Seton-Watson is magisterial and should be read by all foreigners who speak English in Romania. I am ashamed that I had only skimmed it before. I had never opened Treptow, which the author gave me in 1999, before he went inside, and had assumed it would be a facile popularisation but, despite the numerous mistakes and misspellings, it was a more vivid, condensed account than Seton-Watson and taught me rather a lot. Dennis Deletant tells me it was written by a  group of Romanian historians not by Treptow and completed very hurriedly - hence the mistakes and typos - so that Adrian Nastase, when he was Foreign Minister,  had copies to give away when he visited the USA.

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebestyen is journalism rather than history, but very interesting.

I read Here is New York, by E. B. White, because Johann Hari tweeted that it was the best essay of all time. It is not but it is very well written and might inspire me to write about Bucharest if I am lucky. But reading Remote People by Evelyn Waugh immediately after Here is New York makes Waugh's prose seem even more dazzling than usual. White is a very good stylist whom Waugh effortlessly outdoes. Although perhaps I am biassed as I 'get' English writers so much better than American ones. Americans speak our language but do not think like we do. And they write in English but not in the setting of the English class system, which always makes reading them seem eerie.

The Psychopath's Bible is a reminder that psychopaths, though amoral or rather immoral, have values they believe in, which they cannot be argued out of - might is right, survival of the fittest, victims want to be victims, selfishness is good, the ideas of Ayn Rand. A reminder that morality, like art, is inspired by love not logic.

'Tom' Holland went to my college years after me and took a Double First in Classics and History and has many books to his credit. I try not to be jealous, but he cannot write.

I haven't decided whether I love Gibbon yet - reading a book on a kindle makes love more difficult, for some reason - but I am enjoying him, though his paganism and contempt for the early church disgust me. He is a very good historian indeed. Cardinal Newman said, "It is melancholy to say it, but the chief, perhaps the only English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the unbeliever Gibbon."  

Four novels, which is much better than my usual score, although I am not sure the two Raymond Chandler thrillers really count.

Films seen

Six films is also much better than my normal score, which is none. None were any good, except In A Better World. Albert Nobbs was dull, pleasant but in the end a waste of time - please read George Moore's wonderful short story instead. George Moore is an unjustly neglected genius (like me).

The Blue Dahlia (1947)*
The Brasher Doubloon (1947)
Albert Nobbs (2011)
In a Better World (2011)
Thank you for Smoking (2005)
Goodbye, Lenin (2003)

Thoughts

The Balkans is not a geographical expression but a state of mind.


Romania is the Orient dreaming that it is France.


Time is all we have.


History, like poetry, art and jokes, exists to reveal a hidden order and meaning in the world.


Economics is in itself unimportant - economics reflects culture which reflects, in the broadest sense of the idea, religion (and genetics).

My commonplace book

"Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working." - Pablo Picasso

So, as I was saying, the rule is don't think what to write, write what you are thinking and then develop and expand the thought.  Ronnie Smith

Ah best to just get something down however ghastly it is then work on it. Writing is rewriting.

Nick Cohen

"Never mistake motion for action."

Ernest Hemingway

"Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on"

Alan Watts

‎'She was good, quiet, dull, and amiable, and young only because she was twenty-three.'

E.M Forster

For writers it is always said that the first twenty years contain the whole of experience - the rest is observation - but I think this is equally true of us all.

Graham Greene

I think that most books are written in a language thirty years out of date, a generation out of date. The rhythms of thought that are actually out there don't correspond. We write in a kind of pedagogic code. Maybe writing does lag behind the times. I wanted to suggest the new rhythms of thought which change all the time. I think that the modern consciousness gets more and more to be an ungodly mix. 

Martin Amis

"A love for tradition has never weakened a nation, indeed it has strengthened nations in their hour of peril."Sir Winston Churchill


The Victorians liked sex. If they hadn't there would have been no Edwardians. Me

You can't sit around thinking. You have to sit around writing.
~ David Long



There always comes a time when you have to choose between thinking and acting. It's called growing up.
~ Albert Camus

Everything comes and goes; marked by lovers and styles of clothes.
~ Joni Mitchell

Toryism has always been a form of paternal socialism.  

Harold Macmillan

“There’s four sorts of people tryin’ to get to be rulers. They all want to make things better, but they want to make ’em better in different ways. There’s Conservatives an’ they want to make things better by keepin’ ’em jus’ like what they are now. An’ there’s Lib’rals an’ they want to make things better by alterin’ them jus’ a bit, but not so’s anyone’d notice, an’ there’s Socialists, an’ they want to make things better by takin’ everyone’s money off ’em, an’ there’s Communists an’ they want to make things better by killin’ everyone but themselves.”


Henry in “William, Prime Minister” (1929)

"Practice only impossibilities." 

John Lyly

“I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers.” 

Henry David Thoreau

"Aristocracy may have its faults but ratocracy, which is what in practice a meritocratic system produces, is proving even worse."

Peregrine Worsthorne

The Sexual Revolution is a complete rebellion against authority, natural and supernatural, even against the body and its needs, its natural functions of child bearing. This is not reverence for life, it is a great denial and more resembles Nihilism than the revolution that they think they are furthering.

Dorothy Day

“These memories, which are my life — for we possess nothing certainly except the past — were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl.” 

The narrator in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited




And even now, when opinion across Europe is unanimous that immigration must be controlled, and that Muslims must be integrated into the secular culture, liberal politicians are refusing to admit to a problem or to confess that they are the cause of it. They still preach “multiculturalism” as the sign of our “vibrant” future; they still condemn “racism and xenophobia” as the enemy; they still try to state and solve the problem by the promiscuous multiplication of “human rights.” Their Enlightenment creed makes it all but impossible for them to acknowledge the fundamental truth, which is that indigenous communities have legitimate expectations which take precedence over the demands of strangers. True, indigenous communities may also have duties of charity towards those strangers—or towards some of them. But charity is a gift, and there is no right to receive it, still less to force it from those reluctant to give.


The fact is that the people of Europe are losing their homelands, and therefore losing their place in the world. I don’t envisage the Tiber one day foaming with much blood, nor do I see it blushing as the voice of the muezzin sounds from the former cathedral of St. Peter. But the city through which the Tiber flows will one day cease to be Italian, and all the expectations of its former residents, whether political, social, cultural, or personal, will suffer a violent upheaval, with results every bit as interesting as those that Powell prophesied.

Roger Scuton

All this need not be a total disaster. It is possible, though hard, to forge a United Kingdom made up of many ethnicities. Leaders like Mr Cameron are right to try to insist on common standards and better rules, rather than to despair. But whatever it is, and however well it turns out, it cannot be England. Perhaps when I am very old, my grandchildren will ask me what England was. It will be a hard question to answer, but I think I shall tell them that it seemed like a good idea while it lasted, and that it lasted for about 1,000 years.

Charles Moore

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.” 

"A problem cannot be solved by the same mind set that created it."

Albert Einstein

‘The past is attractive because it is drained of fear’ (Carlyle)

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.
Friedrich Nietzsche

 ‘

... the devouring aspect of the unconscious, which suffocates life and prevents the human being from developing. It is the swallowing or the regressive aspect of the unconscious, the looking-backward tendency, which grips when one is overcome by the unconscious. ....pull towards death.

..it is the infantile shadow must be sacrificed  - that which always pulls us back into being dependent, lazy, playful, escaping problems and responsibility and life.

"If a man devotes himself to the instructions of his own unconscious, it can bestow this gift [of renewal], so that suddenly life, which has been stale and dull, turns into a rich unending inner adventure, full of creative possibilities."

“You have to be lonely so that the unconscious becomes stronger."

" The ego must be able to listen attentively and to give itself, without any further design or purpose, to that inner urge toward growth. ... People living in cultures more securely rooted than our own have less trouble in understanding that it is necessary to give up the utilitarian attitude of conscious planning in order to make way for the inner growth of the personality." 

Marie Louise von Frank

"The criminal aberrations of the Catholic clergy threaten the physical and moral health of our young people."  Joseph Goebbels May 30, 1937

‎"The limits of my language are the limits of my world." 
Wittgenstein

People are of immense importance but the relations between them are not. 
EM Forster

"The stupid person's idea of a clever person." 
Elizabeth Bowen on Aldous Huxley

Whatever happens around you, don't take it personally... Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves." 
Don Miguel Ruiz 

Always start at the end and work backwards. 

If you don't have faith in yourself, you don't have enough faith in God. 

‎"Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float. And the attitude of faith is the very opposite of clinging to belief, of holding on" (Alan Watts) 

The drunkenness of things being various - Louis MacNeice

It's only work if somebody makes you do it.

Calvin and Hobbes

There is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.
Friedrich Nietzsche

The way you see yourself will determine how people see you

Paulo Coelho

"Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is"  
Carl Jung

“Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it," 
Mark Twain 

‎"Forget past mistakes. Forget failures. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it." 
William Durant

Friendship without the everyday becomes an allegory. 
Jules Romains

 Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth. 
Mike Tyson

Jowett’s words, as quoted in Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks: ‘We have sought truth and sometimes perhaps found it. But have we had any fun?’

“What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.” 
Sigmund Freud.

"If you can't say anything good about someone, sit right here by me." 
Alice Roosevelt Longworth

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
Michelangelo

"They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they're not laughing now" 
Bob Monkhouse


"Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, but Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right." 
Hillaire Belloc

A woman asked a barman for a double entendre, so
the barman gave her one.

To speak another language is to possess another soul
Charlemagne (?)

 The idea is to die young as late as possible.
Ashley Montagu

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
- Albert Einstein

'For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.' Earnest Hemingway (when challenged to write a short story in six words)

"The habit of ignoring nature is deeply implanted in our times. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life." 
Marc Chagall


I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
-- Maya Angelou

reculer pour mieux sauter ....
anonymous - Napoleon?


"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
-- Groucho Marx


‎"Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils ... "- Louis Hector Berlioz

Bowmen bend their bows when they wish to shoot: unbrace them when the shooting is over. Were they kept always strung they would break and fail the archer in time of need. So it is with men. If they give themselves constantly to serious work, and never indulge awhile in pastime or sport, they lose their senses and become mad." -- Herodotus

"At the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends" -Martin Luther King

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." Plato

"Anyone can sympathize with the suffering of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success"- Oscar Wilde.

We read to know that we are not alone.
~C.S. Lewis


No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others... Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false. ~P. D. James

Those whom the gods love grow young. ~ Oscar Wilde


The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.
- Einstein

"The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes" - Marcel Proust

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind" - John Stuart Mill

A smooth sea never a skilled mariner made.
- English proverb



“... We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

Paul Bowles

"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

"I like deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -- Douglas Adams

"Ficition is obliged to possibilities. Truth isn't." -- Mark Twain

"Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops." -- Kurt Vonnegut

‎"Even awake I was sleeping. Dumped in a foreign city, where I ain’t known hardly a soul, the language a constant door in my face. It weighed on me, the
loneliness, the jealousy."
HALF BLOOD BLUES by Esi Edugyan 

"Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion." George Washington


If you've heard this story before, don't stop me, because I'd like to hear it again.
-Groucho Marx


Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process
he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss,
the abyss also looks into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche 1844

Novelist Bob Leuci:
“There’s an invisible link that connects all people who perceive themselves as writers.”

For everything there is a season,
And a time for every matter under heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to throw away stones, And a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep, and a time to throw away;
A time to tear, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate,
A time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8

It is the same everywhere. The Athenians look on this constant change with a mixture of abstract pride and private bewilderment. Much of this architectural restlessness may spring from the sudden boom in tourism. One's first reaction to this new windfall is delight: Greek economy needs these revenues; one's second is sorrow. Economists rejoice, but many an old Athenian, aware of the havoc that tourism has spread in Spain and France and Italy, lament that this gregarious passion, which destroys the object of its love, should have chosen Greece as its most recent, most beautiful, perhaps its most fragile victim. They know that in a few years it has turned dignified islands and serene coasts into pullulating hells. In Athens itself, many a delightful old tavern has become an alien nightmare of bastard folklore and bad wine. Docile flocks converge on them, herded by button-eyed guides, Mentors and Stentors too, with all Manchester, all Lyons, all Cologne and half the Middle-West at heel. The Athenians who ate there for generations have long since fled. (Fortunately, many inns survive unpolluted; but for how long? The works of writers mentioning these places by name should be publicly burnt by the common hangman.) Greece is suffering its most dangerous invasion since the time of Xerxes.

..In dark moments I see bay after lonely bay and island after island as they are today and as they may become … The shore is enlivened with fifty jukeboxes and a thousand transistor wirelesses. Each house is now an artistic bar, a boutique or a curio shop; new hotels tower and concrete villas multiply. 
Patrick Leigh Fermor

Anxiety is fear of one's self.

Fervid atheism is usually a screen for repressed religion.

Love is only a seeking for love in return, 'Do, ut des' (I give, that thou shalt give). If the patient notices that love is not given in return or that it has not reached that degree which he expected, defiance enters in place of the love, which in turn manifests itself as active resistance.

People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding.


Wilhelm Stekel:

Paul Theroux's 3 rules of travel: 'Travel on the ground — avoiding air travel. Travel alone when possible. Keep notes. That’s it.'

“enjoy each moment. appreciate what is. be completely here and now. that is where eternity is found.”
Peter McWilliams

I am always prepared to recognize that there can be two points of view- mine, and one that is probably wrong.
J.G. Gorton

"Those who have some means think that the most important thing in the world is love. The poor know that it is money." -- Gerald Brenan

What you think of yourself is much more important than what others think of you. Seneca.

One of the good things about getting older is that you find you're more interesting than most of the people you meet. – Lee Marvin 

‎"The measure of a man is his unflappability - but this comes not from hardening and defending against painful thoughts, emotions and experiences but by being willing to experience it all" ~ (Ken Wilber)

Every major question in history is a religious question. Hilaire Belloc

"To have laughed often and much; won the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; earned the appreciation of honest critics and endured the betrayal of false friends; appreciated beauty; found the best in others; left the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

'The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.' Vladimir Ilyich Lenin 

 “Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent, because the European enlightenment is more important than people.” Dostoevsky

Growing up, all I wanted to be was a pilot  and when I left the RAF in my early twenties all I wanted to do was travel, which is what motivated me to go into journalism. I just saw writing a novel – stupidly – as a way of making a bit of money. A means to get me out of a jam. Frederick Forsythe

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune. ~ William James

"One day, millions of men will leave the Southern Hemisphere to go to the Northern Hemisphere. And they will not go there as friends. Because they will go there to conquer it. And they will conquer it with their sons. The wombs of our women will give us victory."

- Houari Boumediene, President of Algeria, at the United Nations, 1974

The Euro was an archetypal modernist project, maybe the last modernist
political project,  in which an elite group decided it had a solution,
and resolved to impose it by any means necessary regardless of whether
the public wanted it or not. In this limited sense only, the Euro is
comparable to the Leninist doctrine that the vanguard communist party
could act in the interests of the working class without ever asking
the permission of the working class.

Nick Cohen

.....the top five things that made me happy. It went like this: (1) my marriage, (2) my faith, (3) getting trashed, (4) going on holiday, (5) my friends

Julie Burchill

When I look at Istanbul, which becomes a little more complex and cosmopolitan with every passing year, and which now attracts immigrants from all over Asia and Africa, I have no trouble reaching this conclusion: the poor, unemployed and undefended of Asia and Africa who are looking for new places to live and work cannot be kept out of Europe indefinitely.

Orhan Pamuk

There is nothing with which every man is so afraid as getting to know how enormously much he is capable of doing and becoming. 
Soren Kierkegaard

"As I never tire of pointing out, Winston Churchill presided over the war effort from 1940-45 with great distinction without always being entirely sober." 
Michael White.

'A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things.' -- Ecclesiastes 10:19

'The eurocrats deluded themselves in particular about the nature of Greece, which has not thrown off its Ottoman legacy and where government is regarded as a source of favours rather than a provider of taxpayer-financed services.' Sir Samuel Brittan

 “Youth – nothing else worth having in the world… and I had youth, the transitory, the fugitive, now, completely and abundantly. Yet what was I going to do with it?

Certainly not squander its gold on the commonplace quest for riches and respectability, and then secretly lament the price that had to be paid for these futile ideals. Let those who wish have their respectability —I wanted freedom, freedom to indulge in whatever caprice struck my fancy, freedom to search in the farthermost corners of the Earth for the beautiful, the joyous and the romantic.”  Richard Halliburton (1900–1939)

Men are those creatures with two legs and eight hands. Jayne Mansfield

Nadia Comaneci: Do not pray to have an easy life; pray to be a strong person!

‎‎"Develop an interest in life as you see it; the people, things, literature, music-the world is so rich, simply throbbing with rich treasures, beautiful souls and interesting people. Forget yourself."
Henry Miller

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
- W.B. Yeats

Rodney Dangerfield: My mother didn't breast feed me. She said she only liked me as a friend.

"The people's voice is odd.

It is and it is not the voice of God."

Alexander Pope

Am I alone in wishing Osama spends the afterlife queuing in airport security? Amanda Craig

The most luxurious thing in the world has nothing to do with aristocracy or attractiveness. It's time. Being able to take a nap on a Sunday or having the opportunity to enjoy a glass of wine in a beautiful setting at 1600 are luxuries well beyond any palace poshness. Barry Kolodkin

“I have wandered all my life, and I have also travelled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment.”  Hilaire Belloc

"The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there." 
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former US Ambassador to the United Nations.

 “Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.” Carl Jung

"'Federally funded cowboy poetry.' That phrase has never existed in any language in the entire course of human history. That's an innovation of our time and the fact that that combination of words can be used with all seriousness by the Senate majority leader of the world’s superpower is an indication of the depths we're in." -Mark Steyn

I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move. (R.L. Stevenson)

A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.
--Arthur Schopenhauer

“According to a new study, thinking too hard about a problem leads to poor choices - difficult decisions are best handled by our unconscious minds.”

Oddly enough, I am reminded of an exchange my wife once witnessed between Francis Bacon and the columnist Jeffrey Bernard in a Soho restaurant. Bacon asked Bernard whom in the world he would most like to bed. Bernard said Cyd Charisse and Monica Vitti, then asked the great painter about his ultimate fantasy.

"I'd like to get into bed with Colonel Gaddafi," replied Bacon after some thought. It turns out that all these governments and the previously revered LSE have a lot in common with Francis Bacon.

Henry Porter

The Observer, Sunday 13 March 2011

Antichrist is not a demonic figure typified in our own century by the person of a fascist or communist dictator or one of his henchmen....Antichrist reveals himself much more subtly and plausibly than this. He appears as an outwardly enlightened man of apparent good nature and well-disposed to his fellows, who takes charge of the world and usurps the place of God. He organises the world into the form of an advanced welfare state and makes everyone happy provided they bow down and worship him. All who co-operate with him live pleasant, uneventful lives, have plenty of possessions, and strive for the maintenance of their present status. Their inner eye is no longer lifted up to the Figure on the cross, who is the way, the truth and the life in God. Therefore they are not themselves transformed. They remain comfortable, complacent people, selfish and blind to the greater world, living like intelligent animals. They do not respond to the existential problems of life until they disappear, like the followers of Korah, swallowed up by the earth that splits and opens to receive their mortal bodies (Numbers 16:31). This is the way of Antichrist, that great deceiver, who promises us all the kingdoms of the world in their glory if we will only fall down and do him homage (Matthew 4:9).

Be where you are and look forward. That is where contentment and happiness live. 
Ronnie Smith

"Where there is an ebullient sense of humour, the holy spirit cannot be far away."

Of one thing I have no doubt: until we can love ourselves there is no possibility of our loving anyone else, even a person as close to us in physical relationship as a parent, spouse or child. Only when we love ourselves with the intensity of charity that will accept all aspects of ourselves as infinitely treasurable, even when they are palpably immature if not frankly perverse, can we be still and flow out in charity to all around us.

If, on the other hand, I acknowledge the darkness that is mine and lift it up to God in prayer, He will, through His healing grace, effect an inner transformation of my psyche, so that I will be driven by love and compassion for others and not by motives of self-improvement. The paradox about self-awareness is that once we have achieved it we should let it go. It is far removed from the self consciousness of the selfish man grasping for material or spiritual gifts to boost the self that he really hates, or that of the neurotic person enslaved by the imagined contempt of others for the self that he despises.

....every relationship is sacred. This applies especially to the most intimate of all relationships, the sexual one. It is a sacrament, and is defiled to the detriment of all participating in it. It is worth remembering that in the properly consummated sexual act, an act in which both parties have lost themselves in love for each other, each experiences a new reality, one that transcends the narrow isolation of personal gratification. Such an experience is the glimpse of mystical union destined for Everyman - by which I mean the person who does not aspire to great spiritual understanding but lives in a useful mundane way - by God's grace. I believe that this is the primary purpose of sexual union; the other two, growth into a full person and the procreation of the race, are secondary to it. It follows from this that sexual intercourse is a holy action, and should not be contemplated except in a spirit of awe and gratitude. How far man has fallen from this understanding is a measure of his distance from the divine nature implanted in him. I should add at the same time, that those exceptional people called to the state of celibacy in the cause of a greater love for all mankind, may also experience mystical union in their unceasing self-giving to others.

The wise person delays marriage until he has attained sufficient intellectual and emotional balance to judge clearly how he wishes to order his life. The practice of self-control, which is the last fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5.z2), should govern all physical explorations of sex until there is a deep love for the other person.

Martin Israel

Skill to do comes of doing.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life is short. Kiss slowly, laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly.

Loneliness, when accepted, becomes a gift that will lead us to find a purpose in life.
Paulo Coelho

Mr. Kremlin was distinguished for ignorance for he had only one idea and that was wrong. Disraeli.

No man is forgotten when it is convenient to remember him. Disraeli.

"The human being needs a ruthless father, writes [the psychoanalyst] Fromm. It's difficult to be free and entirely independent, to make decisions about your life. ... To put it clearly, we [in Romania] don't live in a traditional civilian democracy but in post-communism, a society with its own special rules where the flight from freedom becomes nostalgia for the slavery of the past. Many console themselves however they can: Some have more courage, ... others live like unhappy orphans lost in their 'nostalgia for the father' whose commands ensured that you - the eternal child - never had to make decisions. ... The fact that the number of 'orphans' who long for an authoritative force in their lives is growing shows that the current system is not stabilising. On the contrary, fewer and fewer people will trust it as long as it fails to provide solutions." Ion Vianu 

" Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them."
Alfred North Whitehead  

Silence is the language of God;
It is also the language of the heart.
Dag Hammarskjöld

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.
Yogi Berra

..some frighteningly destructive people seem to have had all the social ingredients for a happy, constructive life. They are called psychopaths, but this categorization does nothing to explain their character. It is they who are especially powerful mediums of destructive cosmic forces, and their power is related to their intelligence and their ability to communicate on a psychic level with other people. The murderous type of dictator, so common in our century, typifies this trend to its most devastating extent.

In order to escape the terrible impact of truth that impinges on the naked soul, the person flees from one source of social activity to another, if he is what is generally called a "normal" individual. He strives desperately to sustain the status quo by shallow conviviality or by interesting himself in some group activity, which may be educational, artistic or political. The end of this is not so much the education of the mind as the establishment of new associations that will be able to fill the threatening vacuum and allow the even flow of life to proceed. It is a fearful thing to fall into the void that is one's unfulfilled inner life, almost as terrible as falling into the hands of the living God that the writer of the Letter to the Hebrews describes. Indeed the two experiences touch each other; I will never know God until I know the inner hell of my unredeemed nature and the darkness that lies outside the cosy calm of intellectual assurance which I have until now identified with the whole of my life.

The most exalted knowledge is of spiritual origin. It speaks of a morality that is native to the human soul, that may well be inculcated by a religious tradition but is affirmed rather than initiated by it. This natural morality is a quality that categorically separates the human being from other animals. If it is completely absent the person becomes a dangerous criminal devoid of a conscience, and is diagnosed as a psychopath.

The light of the demon-possessed individual with a yearning for absolute power consuming their soul is alluring and scintillating, its strength magnifying itself and deceiving its object so that its source lies unrevealed except to those of spiritual sight who can discern the emptiness of the chalice from which it emanates. This falsified light also comes primarily from God, who is the source of all life, power and light, but it is shown to be perverted by the corrupted will of the creature who has grasped at a divine status.


Martin  Israel

I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.

- Groucho Marx

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast. Oscar Wilde

‎"Humans are not ideally set up to understand logic; they are ideally set up to understand stories", Roger C. Schank - cognitive scientist.

That in woman which inspires respect and fundamentally fear is her nature, which is more ‘natural’ than that of man, her genuine, cunning, beast-of-prey suppleness, the tiger’s claws beneath the glove, the naivety of her egoism, her ineducability and inner savagery, and how incomprehensible, capacious and prowling her desires and virtues are .. Nietzsche

People are called to believe in Jesus, and to trust in God’s providence – not in their own efforts. Edward Norman

Spiritual formation is progressive. With each step those who try to love Jesus will discover how great is his love for them. Edward Norman

‎"I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies." Anthony Haden-Guest.

Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't. Margaret Thatcher

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.
Carl Jung, Dreams

IWhatever you do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. (Goethe)

Live, work, act. Don't sit here and brood and grope among insoluble enigmas. (Ibsen)

The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. - William James

 have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do. Leonardo da Vinci

‎"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world." George Bernard Shaw

When the famous actor David Garrick asked what was the greatest pleasure in life, Johnson “answered fucking and second was drinking. And therefore he wondered why there were not more drunkards, for all could drink though all could not fuck”

All philosophy is disguised psychology
Nietzsche

"If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts." 


Camille Paglia:

The age is described by welfare: it occupies the space for sacral values once filled by the churches. Indeed the neo-Puritanism of the times promotes welfare considerations as exclusively important.

Extraordinarily enough, the leaders of the Church manage to identify the present welfare idealism - which is based in Humanist materialism - as fundamental Christianity, an application of the love of neighbour enjoined by Christ. But preoccupation with material welfare, whatever higher considerations may become attached to it, cultivates worldliness, and is an enemy of authentic faith.

Through contact with liberal and Christian values the other world religions were sanitised and made acceptable to Western sensibilities: widows were no longer incinerated alive on their husbands' funeral pyres, and the way was opened for that late-20th-century phenomenon, the Western idealising of Oriental religiosity, beads and mantras in Californian condominiums.

The Churches themselves, in fact, have rushed to acclaim the new humanism - the `caring society' - as the very essence of Christianity. But it is actually quite pagan, concentrating as it does on the merely worldly needs of people in a way which is plainly contrary to the renunciations indicated in the teachings of Christ. This is not an academic matter. For when Christians identify the present secular enthusiasm for humanity as basic Christianity - the love of neighbour - they are in reality acclaiming and legitimising their own replacement.


Edward Norman

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, you are a leader.


John Quincy Adams

Millions of modern people of the white civilization that is, the civilization of Europe and America have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. they take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past.

Belloc

In 1938 Czechoslovakia was betrayed. In 1939 Poland was saved. Less than one hundred thousand Czechs died during the war. Six and a half million Poles were killed. Which was better—to be a betrayed Czech or a saved Pole?

A.J.P Taylor:

"What made me who I am now is the sum of all the humiliations suffered during childhood"

Sarkozy

Seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand. ~ Saint Augustine

"People are fully alive to the danger of superstition in priests...in course of time they may find out that professors may be just as bad." Lord Salisbury

‎"I believe that inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and therefore it is meaningless to discuss the advantages of their elimination." Evelyn Waugh

‘They say I am against reform. I am not against reform. There is a time for everything. And the time for reform is when it can no longer be resisted.’ Duke of Cambridge

The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best. ~ Epictetus

At any given moment, there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas, which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that, or the other, but it is ‘not done' to say it . . . [And] anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, whether in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. 
George Orwell

Knowledge which is divorced from justice, may be called cunning rather than wisdom. 
Cicero

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods. Aristotle

. 

‎"Cities have sexes: London is a man, Paris a woman, and New York a well-adjusted transsexual." 
Angela Carter

‎'I’m talking nonsense, I know, but I would rather babble away and at least partially express something difficult than reproduce impeccable clichés.' 
Thomas Mann - Magic Mountain

Personally the last person I want to know about is myself.

It’s a dry quality that you get with English eccentricity at its best; Irish eccentricity is much more outlandish. Crazier. English eccentricity is something you hardly notice until all of a sudden you realize that you’re in the presence of an eccentric mind. It’s not like that at all with an Irish eccentric; you know about it all very easily and quickly. English eccentricity has a suburban quality—it’s like a very neatly trimmed garden in which you suddenly realize that the flower beds aren’t what they seem to be. There’s a kind of well-turned-out quality about English eccentricity, whereas the Irish equivalent is higgledy-piggledy, and sometimes even noisy. The marvel of the English version is that it’s almost secretive. I’ve never quite believed in the obvious English eccentric, the man who comes into the pub every night and is known to be a dear old eccentric. I always suspect that that is probably self-invention. What I do believe in is the person who scarcely knows he’s eccentric at all. Then he says something so extraordinary and you realize he perhaps lives in a world that is untouched by the world you share with him.

I don’t like the Church of England. I feel much more drawn towards Catholicism when I’m in England—not that I’d do anything about it. I always feel that Protestantism in England is strangely connected with the military. All the cathedrals here are full of military honors. It’s part of an establishment with the armed forces; tombs, rolls of honor, that sort of thing.

William Trevor

From the crooked timbers of humanity no straight thing was ever made. 

Kant

"Veşnicia s-a născut la sat"
Lucian Blaga