In 16th-century Italy there lived Lodovico Gonzaga, a 16-year old seminarist who was very fond of playing ball. Once a certain priest passing by wondered if for a future priest the youth was too keen on his pursuit and asked him:"What would you do if you learned that in half an hour the end of the world was coming?" To which Lodovico replied: "I'd play on." According to the Russian thinker Georgy Fedotov, the importance of culture lies in precisely that: we go on playing ball on the verge of Doomsday...
Vladimir BarskyRelated topics
ball certain coming culture doomsday end fond future half hour importance keen once passing playing play priest pursuit reply russian seminarist thinker verge world youth lies italyRelated quotes
No matter how much we may study, it is not possible to come to know God unless we live according to His commandments, for God is not know by science, but by the Holy Spirit. Many philosophers and learned men came to the belief that God exists, but they did not know God. It is one thing to belief that God exists and another to know Him. If someone has come to know God by the Holy Spirit, his soul will burn with love for God day and night, and his soul cannot be bound to any earthly thing.
Silouan the Athonite
It is a fairly consistent law of humanity that men spend about half their lives at war. A Frenchman, called Lapouge, calculated that from the year 1100 to the year 1500, England had been 207 years at war and 212 years from 1500 to 1900. In France the corresponding figures would be 192 and 181 years. According to that same man Lapouge, nineteen million men are killed in war every century. Their blood would fill three million barrels of 180 liters each, and would feed a fountain of blood running 700 liters an hour from the beginning of history.
André Maurois
I overtook, coming from Italy,
In Germany, a great and famous Earl
Of England; the most goodly fashioned man
I ever saw: from head to foot in form
Rare and most absolute; he had a face
Like one of the most ancient honoured Romans
From whence his noblest family was derived;
He was besides of spirit passing great
Valiant and learned, and liberal as the sun,
Spoke and writ sweetly, or of learned subjects,
Or of the discipline of public weals:
And 'twas the Earl of Oxford.
Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford
In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture and attained the capacity to see culture from the outside. To clarify the point: in spite of all social criticism and all consciousness of the primacy of economic factors, the fundamental importance of the mind-"Geist”-was quasi a dogma self-evident to me from the very beginning. The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.
Theodor Adorno
Remember this moment. If we don't convince the field marshal (Fedor von Bock) to fly to Hitler at once and have these orders (Commissar Order) canceled, the German people will be burdened with a guilt the world will not forget in a hundred years. This guilt will fall not only on Hitler, Himmler, Göring, and their comrades but on you and me, your wife and mine, your children and mine, that woman crossing the street, and those children over there playing ball.
Henning von Tresckow
