Awesome Quotations (or, How to blog without thinking for yourself)

[The following lines are excerpts from my spring and summer reading.]

A one-sentence definition of a Catholic from Chesterton:

Now a Catholic is he who has plucked up courage to face the incredible and inconceivable idea that something else may be wiser than he is.

Walker Percy on various worldviews:

This life is far too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, 'Scientific Humanism.' That won't do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight; i.e., God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don't see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and wouldn't let go until God identified himself and blessed him.

Graham Greene on man as Imago Dei:

When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity -- that was a quality God's image carried with it. When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate. Hate was just a failure of imagination.

GKC on solitude:

The reason why even the normal human being should be half a hermit is that it is the only way in which his mind can have a half-holiday. It is the only way to get any fun even out of the facts of life; yes, even if the facts are games and dances and operas. It bears most resemblance to the unpacking of luggage. It has been said that we live on a railway station; many of us live in a luggage van; or wander about the world with luggage that we never unpack at all. For the best things that happen to us are those we get out of what has already happened… Now when people merely plunge from crush to crush, and from crowd to crowd, they never discover the positive joy of life.

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GKC quotations are from his late essay collection The Well and the Shallows ("My Six Conversions and "The Case for Hermits," respectively). Percy's bit appears in a mock interview of himself at the end of his essay collection Signposts in a Strange Land. Greene's sentences come from his novel The Power and the Glory. I apologize for the weird alignment here; I'm having trouble with the program.