Quotes to Note

“Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.”
Soren Kierkegaard

" A wise man devoutly thanks God that the price of knowledge is labor, and that when we buy the truth, we must pay the price. If you wish to enjoy the prospect at the mountain’s summit, you must climb its rugged sides.”
Boston Schoolmasters, 1844


Scholars in the Renaissance thought of studia humanitatis (the Liberal Arts) as having this result:
"Society needed well-educated and articulate people who could present ideas in a winsome, convincing way that appealed to deeper springs than merely the intellect. Learning to speak and write in a way that did not bludgeon others into intellectual submission but that persuasively wooed them to agreement offered the opportunity to contribute to the further development of Italian society. Well-crafted speech, elegance in language and winsome appeal to beauty and experience were needed along with solid thought." (from James R. Payton, Jr.'s Getting the Reformation Wrong, a very good book.)

"There is not a square inch in the whole domain of human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: Mine!”
Abraham Kuyper

“The humanities cannot be dismissed. Far from being outmoded, they are eternally relevant precisely because they are the arts of communication, the arts of continuity, and the arts of criticism. Language remains the indispensable medium within which we move and breathe. History provides the group memory which makes the communal bond possible. Philosophical criticism is the only activity through which man’s self-reflection modifies the conditions of his existence. The cup of the humanities, therefore, must be the vessel from which we drink our life.”
Albert William Levi, The Humanities Today (1970).