Quotes from Henry Fairlie

Love wants to enjoy in other ways the human being whom it has enjoyed in bed; it looks forward to having breakfast.

People have been taught to believe that human knowledge is a box of tricks, which they have only to open to draw on it for what they want, so to make all well for themselves or their class or for the world.

People today spend interminable hours telling each other "where they're coming from," and "where they're at," when all that they are doing is inventing implausible little fictions about themselves and their lives. Every new relationship is begun with the dubious exchange of these quirkly little maps.

Whenever love is translated into hatred, we know that sin has entered and wreaked its havoc.

I cannot answer the question, 'Who am I?' except in terms of some sort of statement of the plans and purposes of my life," said Josiah Royce seventy years ago in The Philosophy of Loyalty. "I should say that a person, an individual self, may be defined as a human life lived according to a plan . . .

What is left to Lust when its cravings at last subside, as subside in the end they will? It is alone. It has died. It has made no bonds and is in the desert that it has made, with no longer even a craving.

This is the sin that the avaricious confess to Dante. "Our eyes would never seek the height,/Being bent on earthly matters," so that "love of all true good was quenched in us/By avarice, and our works were left undone.

Some of the evils to which theology says that Lust will give rise are: blindness of intellect in respect of divine things; precipitancy in acting without judgment; want of regard for what befits one's state or person; inconstancy in good; hatred of God as an Avenger of such sins; love of this world and its pleasures; inordinate fear of death.

The desire to build a risk-free society has always been a sign of decadence. It has meant that the nation has given up, that it no longer believes in its destiny, that it has ceased to aspire to greatness, and has retired from history to pet itself.

By the "Establishment," I do not mean only the centers of official power—though they are certainly part of it—but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised.

Love wants to enjoy in other ways the human beings whom it has enjoyed in bed; it looks forward to having breakfast. But in the morning Lust is always furtive.