Quotes by Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Many love humanity only in order to forget God with a clear conscience.

Faith is not knowledge of an object but communion with it.

In the intelligent man faith is the only remedy for anguish.The fool is cured by “reason,” “progress,” alcohol, work.

In spiritually arid centuries, the only man to realize that the century is dying from thirst is the man who still harnesses an underground spring.

In an age in which the media broadcast countless pieces of foolishness, the educated man is defined not by what he knows, but by what he doesnt know.

Modern man is a prisoner who thinks he is free because he refrains from touching the walls of his dungeon.

Modern man is a prisoner who thinks he is free because he refrains from touching thewalls of his dungeon.

Phrases are pebbles that the writer tosses into the reader’s soul.The diameter of the concentric waves they displace depends on the dimensions of the pond.

In unremarkable texts we soon trip on phrases that penetrate into us, as if a sword has thrust up to its hilt inside us.

Everything that makes man feel that mystery envelops him makes him more intelligent.

To be right is just one more reason not to achieve any success.

Swimming against the current is not idiotic if the waters are racing toward a waterfall.

The individual seeks out the heat of the crowd, in this century, to protect himself against the cold emanating from the corpse of the world.

Being a reactionary is not about believing in certain solutions, but about having an acute sense of the complexity of the problems.

To demand that the intelligence abstain from judging mutilates its faculty of understanding.It is in the value judgment that understanding culminates.

Liberty is not an end, but a means. Whoever mistakes it for an end does not know what to do once he attains it.

The particular creature we love is never God’s rival. What ends in apostasy is the worship of man, the cult of humanity.

Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal.

Ideas tyrannize the man who has but few.

It is impossible to convince the fool that there are pleasures superior to those we share with the rest of the animals.