Quotes from Joseph Pearce

That which is timeless is also the most timely.

To live a creative life we must loose our fear of being wrong.

For Tolkien, Catholicism was not an opinion to which one subscribed but a reality to which one submitted. Quite simply, pseudo-psychology aside, Tolkien remained a Catholic for the simple if disarming reason that he believed Catholicism was true.

The dragon sickness is a euphemism for the bourgeois materialism which is rife in our consumerist culture. Smaug's fury at the loss of a single insignificant and practically useless trinket serves as a metaphor for modern man and his mania for possessing trash that he doesn't need.

To me the art of the Counter Reformation was a pure joy and I loved the churches of Bernini and Borromini no less than the ancient basilicas. And this in turn led me to the literature of the Counter Reformation, and I came to know St Theresa and St John of the Cross, compared to whom even the greatest of non-Catholic religious writers seem pale and unreal.19

In the absence of virtue and wisdom, intelligence becomes a servant of evil.

When Belloc said that the Protestant Reformation was the shipwreck of Christendom, he was simply stating a historical fact, but it was controversial because history is political.

That which is timeless is also the most timely.

growing up is about growing in wisdom and virtue and learning to curtail our selfishness so that we can give ourselves more selflessly to others.

He could not write what he wanted, but what he had to.

every life should be a quest to achieve the goal of heaven through a growth in virtue, thereby attaining the power, through grace, to overcome the monsters and demons which seek to prevent the achievement of this paramount goal. It is in this way and with this understanding of the meaning and purpose of life that we are meant to read The Hobbit and it is in this way, and this way alone, that we find its deepest and most applicable meaning.

The war against the dragon is not, therefore, a war against a physical monster, like a dinosaur, but a battle against the wickedness we encounter in our everyday lives. We all face our daily dragons and we must all defend ourselves from them and hopefully slay them. The sobering reality is that we must either fight the dragons that we encounter in life or become dragons ourselves. There is no "comfortable" alternative.

And here is the paradox at the heart of the Christian life: The one who embraces suffering, who dies to himself in order to die for others, is actually happier than the one who shuns suffering and who puts himself above all else.

To go to seances with good intentions is like holding a smoking concert in a powder-magazine on behalf of an orphan asylum.'4

Qué haríamos con dos millones (si los tuviéramos)», explica la diferencia entre los filántropos y los cristianos: «Los filántropos se los darían a los pobres que se lo merecieran, y los cristianos, a los pobres que no lo merecieran; porque si los cristianos fueran verdaderos cristianos, lo primero que pensarían es que ellos mismos constituían un ejemplo de ricos que no merecían serlo»

There is, however, one other figurative representative of humanity in which we fail to recognize our own scornful and pitiful selves at our peril. That pathetic figure reflecting the readers back to themselves very uncomfortably is Gollum. Seldom or perhaps never in the field of human literature has the human soul in a state of addiction to sin been portrayed with such psychological realism and spiritual brilliance.

In such a world, in which virtue is vilified and vice vindicated, it was necessary for Catholics to distance themselves from the zeitgeist: "Today more than ever the Christian must be aware that he belongs to a minority and that he is in opposition to everything that appears good, obvious, logical to the 'spirit of the world,' as the New Testament calls

Steadfast cross, among all other Thou art a tree of great prize; In branch and flower such another I ne wot non in wood nor rise. Sweet be the nails, and sweet be the tree, And sweeter be the burden that hangs upon thee.

his war against modernism and its worship of the spirit of the age. He restored the splendor of truth in his defense of orthodoxy and the splendor of the liturgy in his restoration of tradition. He fought the wickedness of the world in his unremitting and uncompromising battle against the dictatorship of relativism and its culture of death.

but in later life Chesterton made no secret of the fact that he didn't care for institutionalised learning, describing education as 'being instructed by somebody I did not know about something I did not want to know'.

Although I had grown significantly, my spiritual growth was as imperceptible on a daily basis as is the physical growth of a child. I was aware, however, that my reception into the Catholic Church was absolutely necessary to my continued progress. My first confession had cleansed me of my sins, enabling me to move forward with a clean slate, and my regular reception of the Blessed Sacrament supplied the very bread of my life, nourishing me with grace and enabling me to grow healthier. Although

My life since my conversion has, therefore, been an ongoing act of atonement. In particular, I have sought to use the gifts that God has given me to glorify Him and to bring souls to Him, in contrast to the way that I had previously used those same gifts to glorify his enemies and to lead souls astray. This has been the rationale behind my vocation as a Catholic writer in the twenty-five years since my conversion. The

Hatred and bigotry, both of which are the bitter fruits of pride, are self-encapsulating prisons, locking the intellect within the constraining confines of the self-centered ego. There is no way out of this prison of pride without the key provided by God-given grace.

...words are the gateway to reality, the means by which we engage with the objective truth beyond ourselves.