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Excerpts, April 2026

Below are excerpts, and sometimes comments from me on said excerpts, that I think are insightful, either for all time or for the time that this is being posted at (viz. 24th of April, 2026).

The excerpts are from books I hereby recommend to the reader of my blog, and the quotes give you a peek at what you will be getting yourself into.

These are not meant to be excerpts of all the books I have read in the past few months that I find to be well written. Such a post would be so long that we would end up with a thick book filled with excerpts: that time would be better spent reading one of the books mentioned here in full. That is the intention after all, viz. to give you recommendations with spoilers. Hence, there will only be very few recommendations such that you can add them to your list of things to read for the near future. If you want more recommendations, ask me personally.

Non fiction

What’s Wrong With The World - G.K. Chesterton

Note on Chesterton’s books: I have not yet finished reading his books mentioned. I read them during breaks and when waiting in queues. I have made it through most of them and I am convinced that he is worth reading for how enjoyable his writing is among many other reasons.

The parts I’ve shown here are just parts that may be catchy and might make the point of the chapter concisely. However, I’ve enjoyed reading every page of the book and definitely recommend it for anyone looking for a relief from the nonsense you have to see everyday on the internet and the media about issues that you know they’re wrong about. Even if you and I may not fully agree with Chesterton, the kind of reasoning and rhetorical ability with which he writes makes the experience very enjoyable.

The Fear Of The Past

The only true freethinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.

There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.

The Enemies Of Property

But in the modern world we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the old. Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it.

This fruitful strife with limitations, when it concerns some airy entertainment of an educated class, goes by the name of Art. But the mass of men have neither time nor aptitude for the invention of invisible or abstract beauty. For the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present discussions—the idea of property. The average man cannot cut clay into the shape of a man; but he can cut earth into the shape of a garden; and though he arranges it with red geraniums and blue potatoes in alternate straight lines, he is still an artist; because he has chosen. The average man cannot paint the sunset whose colours he admires; but he can paint his own house with what colour he chooses, and though he paints it pea green with pink spots, he is still an artist; because that is his choice. Property is merely the art of the democracy. It means that every man should have something that he can shape in his own image, as he is shaped in the image of heaven. But because he is not God, but only a graven image of God, his self-expression must deal with limits; properly with limits that are strict and even small.

The Free Family

It may be said that this institution of the home is the one anarchist institution. That is to say, it is older than law, and stands outside the State. By its nature it is refreshed or corrupted by indefinable forces of custom or kinship. This is not to be understood as meaning that the State has no authority over families; that State authority is invoked and ought to be invoked in many abnormal cases. But in most normal cases of family joys and sorrows, the State has no mode of entry. It is not so much that the law should not interfere, as that the law cannot. Just as there are fields too far off for law, so there are fields too near; as a man may see the North Pole before he sees his own backbone.

If we all floated in the air like bubbles, free to drift anywhere at any instant, the practical result would be that no one would have the courage to begin a conversation. It would be so embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly whisper, and then have to shout the last half of it because the other party was floating away into the free and formless ether.

If Americans can be divorced for “incompatibility of temper” I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.

The Wildness of Domesticity

And because he, the luxurious man, dictates the tone of nearly all “advanced” and “progressive” thought, we have almost forgotten what a home really means to the overwhelming millions of mankind.

For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim.

For a plain, hardworking man the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.

I take, then, this one institution as a test. As every normal man desires a woman, and children born of a woman, every normal man desires a house of his own to put them into. He does not merely want a roof above him and a chair below him; he wants an objective and visible kingdom;

The Homelessness of Jones

Thus the Future of which we spoke at the beginning has (in England at least) always been the ally of tyranny. The ordinary Englishman has been duped out of his old possessions, such as they were, and always in the name of progress. The destroyers of the abbeys took away his bread and gave him a stone, assuring him that it was a precious stone, the white pebble of the Lord’s elect.

The Romance of Thrift

The modern world must somehow be made to understand (in theology and other things) that a view may be vast, broad, universal, liberal and yet come into conflict with another view that is vast, broad, universal and liberal also. There is never a war between two sects, but only between two universal Catholic Churches. The only possible collision is the collision of one cosmos with another.

Heretics - G.K. Chesterton

Introductory Remarks on the Importance of Orthodoxy

In the fifteenth century men cross-examined and tormented a man because he preached some immoral attitude; in the nineteenth century we fêted and flattered Oscar Wilde because he preached such an attitude, and then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out. It may be a question which of the two methods was the more cruel; there can be no kind of question which was the more ludicrous. The age of the Inquisition has not at least the disgrace of having produced a society which made an idol of the very same man for preaching the very same things which it made him a convict for practising.

When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency. So it is that when a man’s body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health. Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims. There cannot be any better proof of the physical efficiency of a man than that he talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the world. And there cannot be any better proof of the practical efficiency of a nation than that it talks constantly of a journey to the end of the world, a journey to the Judgment Day and the New Jerusalem.

but will anyone say that there are any men stronger than those men of old who were dominated by their philosophy and steeped in their religion? Whether bondage be better than freedom may be discussed. But that their bondage came to more than our freedom it will be difficult for anyone to deny.

I see that the men who killed each other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible than the people who are quarrelling about the Education Act. For the Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness, and trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy. But our modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty.

On the Negative Spirit

Much has been said, and said truly, of the monkish morbidity, of the hysteria which has often gone with the visions of hermits or nuns. But let us never forget that this visionary religion is, in one sense, necessarily more wholesome than our modern and reasonable morality. It is more wholesome for this reason, that it can contemplate the idea of success or triumph in the hopeless fight towards the ethical ideal, in what Stevenson called, with his usual startling felicity, “the lost fight of virtue.” A modern morality, on the other hand, can only point with absolute conviction to the horrors that follow breaches of law; its only certainty is a certainty of ill. It can only point to imperfection. It has no perfection to point to. But the monk meditating upon Christ or Buddha has in his mind an image of perfect health, a thing of clear colours and clean air. He may contemplate this ideal wholeness and happiness far more than he ought; he may contemplate it to the neglect of exclusion of essential things; he may contemplate it until he has become a dreamer or a driveller; but still it is wholeness and happiness that he is contemplating. He may even go mad; but he is going mad for the love of sanity. But the modern student of ethics, even if he remains sane, remains sane from an insane dread of insanity.

The Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle

Book V: Justice

The law, indeed, is none the less correctly laid down because of this defect; for the defect lies not in the law, nor in the lawgiver, but in the nature of the subject-matter, being necessarily involved in the very conditions of human action.

When, therefore, the law lays down a general rule, but a particular case occurs which is an exception to this rule, it is right, where the legislator fails and is in error through speaking without qualification, to make good this deficiency, just as the lawgiver himself would do if he were present, and as he would have provided in the law itself if the case had occurred to him.

What is equitable, then, is just, and better than what is just in one sense of the word—not better than what is absolutely just, but better than that which fails through its lack of qualification. And the essence of what is equitable is that it is an amendment of the law, in those points where it fails through the generality of its language.

The reason why the law does not cover all cases is that there are matters about which it is impossible to lay down a law, so that they require a special decree. For that which is variable needs a variable rule, like the leaden rule employed in the Lesbian style of masonry; as the leaden rule has no fixed shape, but adapts itself to the outline of each stone, so is the decree adapted to the occasion

De Rationibus Fidei (Reasons for the Faith) - St. Thomas Aquinas

This is an article and not a book. It is included in Opuscula III of the works of St. Thomas Aquinas published on https://aquinas.cc. It is very short so it won’t take much of your time but insightful so I can recommend it even if you don’t really care about the topic. Read it on https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~DeRatio. I will give below, however, St. Thomas’s description of the work:

Blessed Peter the apostle received a promise from the Lord that on his confession of faith the Church would be founded and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. That the faith of the Church entrusted to him would hold out inviolate against these gates of hell, he addressed the faithful of Christ saying: proclaim the Lord Christ holy in your hearts (1 Pet 3:15), that is, by firmness of faith. With this foundation established in our hearts we can be safe against any attacks or ridicule of unbelievers against our faith. Therefore Peter adds: always have your answer ready for people who ask you the reason for the hope that you have.

The Christian faith principally consists in acknowledging the holy Trinity, and it specially glories in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. For the message of the cross, says Paul, is folly for those who are on the way to ruin, but for those of us who are on the road to salvation it is the power of God (1 Cor 1:18). Our hope is directed to two things: what we look forward to after death, and the help of God which carries us through this life to future happiness merited by works done by free will.

For it would be useless to quote passages of Scripture against those who do not accept this authority. I wish to satisfy your request, which seems to arise from pious desire, so that you may be prepared with apostolic doctrine to satisfy anyone who asks you for an explanation. On these questions I will make some explanations as easy as the subjects allow, since I have written more amply about them elsewhere.

The theological questions he then goes on to address are:

  1. How generation applies to God
  2. How the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son
  3. The reason for the Incarnation of the Son of God
  4. The meaning of “God became man”
  5. The meaning of “the Word of God”
  6. The meaning of “the faithful receive the Body of Christ”
  7. How there is a special place where souls are purified before receiving beatitude
  8. That Divine predestination does not impose necessity on human acts

List of the books above, with some added

Fiction

I will settle for a list of recommendations for fiction as I think these are more well known than the books said above and do not necessarily need excerpts to be understood why I am recommending them. I may write however my thoughts on them in different posts, but do not expect any in the near future.

I leave with only a few recommendations on fiction (let these serve as gateway drugs into using reading as a more wholesome form of entertainment) as I have a list of books on my library page where you can find good fiction. It is the non fiction books that I have to be careful recommending as these posts are public and people generally don’t understand that just because I like a book and recommend it for it being written well does not mean I agree with it wholeheartedly.