I
“A word that rose to honor at the time of the Renaissance, and that summarized in advance the whole program of modern civilization is ‘humanism’. Men were indeed concerned to reduce everything to purely human proportions, to eliminate every principle of a higher order, and, one might say, symbolically to turn away from the heavens under pretext of conquering the earth; the Greeks, whose example they claimed to follow, had never gone as far in this direction, even at the time of their greatest intellectual decadence, and with them utilitarian considerations had at least never claimed the first place, as they were very soon to do with the moderns..."
IMPERIVM
"The God-fearing person does not love what the world loves, but then what is left — God and himself. The
world takes God away, and therefore the God-fearing person loves himself. The world regards the fear of God as self-love. It is also self-love to be unwilling to deify the world and contemporary opinion, to want to maintain (as every human being ought to) that one's ultimate judgment and ultimate responsibility are to God."
~Søren Kierkegaard
IMPERIVM
"Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes."
~C.G. Jung
IMPERIVM
"In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against Nature not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with heaven and earth."
~John Milton
IMPERIVM
“He who marvels at the beauty of the world in summer will find equal cause for wonder and admiration in winter.”
John Burroughs
II
"...Humanism was form of what has subsequently become contemporary secularism; and, owing to its desire to reduce everything to the measure of man as an end in himself, modern civilization has sunk stage by stage until it has reached the level of the lowest elements in man and aims at little more than satisfying the needs inherent in the material side of his nature, an aim that is in any case quite illusory since it constantly creates more artificial needs than it can satisfy.”
~René Guénon
IMPERIVM
00:00 Piano Concerto
No. 11 in D Major
20:57 Piano Concerto
No. 4 in G Major
IMPERIVM
“I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.”
~Charles Dickens
IMPERIVM
"Wherefore did Nature pour her bounties forth
With such a full and unwithdrawing hand,
Covering the earth with odours, fruits, flocks,
Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable,
But all to please and sate the curious taste?"
John Milton
“Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all... As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength.”
~G.K. Chesterton
IMPERIVM
"Grow in the root of all grace, which is faith. Believe God's promises more firmly than ever. Allow your faith to increase in its fullness, firmness, and simplicity."
~Charles Spurgeon
IMPERIVM