Grilling Gretel

The World Must Be Romanticized

The Accolade, Edmund Leighton, 1901

"The world must be romanticized. Only in that way will one rediscover its original senses. Romanticization is nothing less than a qualitative raising of the power of a thing... I romanticize something when I give the commonplace a higher meaning, the known the dignity of the unknown, and the finite the appearance of the infinite."

~ Novalis

al-Baghdadi - Into the Void

"There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the emptiness of its own theology... A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests; and yet this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there is only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets."

~G. K. Chesterton 

Rembrandt Painted The Best Portrait Of Freedom Ever

No other well-known work of art claiming to reflect the idea of freedom seems to withstand a real competition with The Night Watch (click for more).

Ouroboros

"Symbols are the natural speech of the soul, a language older and more universal than words."

~Edmund Spencer

"the raving ones"

"Suffice it to say that what the word “freedom” has generally come to mean for most of us now, when our usage is at its most habitual and unreflective, is libertarian autonomy and spontaneous volition, the negative freedom of the unrestrained or, at least, minimally restrained individual will. It is a concept of freedom not only impoverished, but ultimately incoherent."

~David Bentley Hart 

Here Be Dragons

The Death of Glaurung by Elena Kukanova

“Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.”

 

– G.K. Chesterton

(from The Medieval Professor)