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The importance it attributes to man is the enigma of Christianity.
Our ability to love something other than God reveals our indelible mediocrity.
The power many men have had would’ve been enough to change the course of history, if they had used their powers to modify certain elementary relationships instead of surrendering to a thousand diversions, spectacular and vain.
It is not in the hands of popular majorities where power is most easily perverted, it is in the hands of the semi-educated.
In the “hell” of a library, there are fewer books than there are in its limbo.
The way that society is going, not even the enthusiastic collaboration of sexual deviants will save us from tedium.
The bourgeoisie: any group of individuals dissatisfied with what they have and satisfied with what they are.
The bourgeoisie does not know how to rule, and running through his blood is a hatred of those who rule. And so, imprinted in his deepest flesh are the scourges of his indelible inferiority. The bourgeois hates power because he knows that as a ruler he is incompetent.
Nobody protests so loudly against the lowly tasks life assigns him as the man incapable of carrying out any others.
Triviality is the price of communication.
The leftist refuses to understand the obvious: that the conclusions of bourgeois thought are the principles of leftist thought.
Boredom is a sure sign of spiritual mediocrity.
Learning to be mediocre is a difficult task. We are all born candidates for parallel lives, and it is hard to be content with only appearing in the civil registry.
Those enemies of the bourgeoisie have been fooled by identifying the bourgeois mentality with a particular economic class. The modern liquidation of a bourgeois class is, in effect, nothing more than a pointless slaughter that does nothing to abolish the bourgeois mentality already dominating all of society.
It doesn’t do any good if the mediocre man emigrates to where great men reside. We all carry our mediocrity with us wherever we go.
The simple, like the genius, have something to do, a task that occupies their lives, an objective that fills their souls. But the mediocre forget the taste of humble tasks, while noble occupations reject them and toss them away, humiliated.
For over a century there has been no upper class. Just a more pretentious segment of the middle class.
The “rational” is simply everything we have become familiar with through routine.
Boring, like an illustrious foreign visitor.
The listener carefully collects the mediocrity we unwittingly utter, as our sharpest intuitions pass him by.
Bourgeois, my brother. If you wear the uniform of the servant, you will find no difference in your life other than that of having to go to the cheap theaters. But don’t worry, you will see the same movies.
It is possible to instill in the contemporary bourgeois any stupid idea in the name of “progress” and to sell him any ugly object in the name of “art.”
Boredom is not, in fact, a gentle torpor that comforts, nor a caution that saves from excess, but hunger in spite of satiety.
The learned man and the simple man are interested in what spontaneously attracts them. The semi-cultured man has only artificial interests.
Christian paradoxes bring joy to the intelligent and the simple, but scandalize those in-between.
Neither imitation of the past, nor of the present, is a guaranteed remedy.
Nothing saves the mediocre from their mediocrity.
There is a certain style of originality and a certain type of ingenuity that immediately betrays the mediocrity of the bearer.
Faced with so many bland intellectuals, so many artists without talent, so many stereotypical revolutionaries, an unpretentious bourgeois looks like a Greek statue.
We are never so embarrassed as when we have pompously uttered something trivial.
The vulgarity of life is, in part, a reflection of the vulgarity of our very souls. It is our lazy intellect, our desire for security and fear of the strange, it is our joyful embrace of every norm, of all easy interpretation, of all things trivial and routine, which vulgarizes the extravagant and mysterious universe all around us.
The bourgeois surrenders all possibility of salvation in order to save his money,
then he sacrifices that money in order to save his skin,
and finally in his naked stupidity and his stupid nakedness, he is dragged, an unfortunate and comical victim, to the scaffold he deserves.
You must choose between routine life and routine thinking.
The curse of the modern man is not that he has to live a mediocre life, but that he believes his modern life could be anything but mediocre.
No one can escape his time, but with a little tact he can circumvent its mediocrities.
Will our achievements amount to distinguished trivialities?
We mediocre men are saved when we are so mediocre that it becomes apparent to us.
Sometimes the spirit dies not from starvation but from feeding on trivialities.
Triumphs tend to be so mediocre that they aren’t worth dirtying ourselves with the traits they demand.
The mediocre only sacrifice themselves to others; great spirits sacrifice themselves to their pride, their ambition, their dreams.
Truth or beauty are fruits miraculously granted to some rare souls. And they are perfect, without spot or blemish, or they are not.
But the works of religion allow a charitable range of perfection. The holiness in which they culminate is not a matter of merit alone. Incredible rewards have been promised to the most humble, and the most mediocre one has found his rightful place there, without being debased by his own doubt. An unlimited path stretches before him, and he who walks this path never arrives, but his failure is to be expected. There, failure does not bring the resignation of the soul and hopeless despair typical of other pitiful shipwrecks, who once sailed the waters God reserves for the few doomed to noble joys and noble sufferings.
We cannot escape the triviality of existence through doors, but only from rooftops.
Almost rich, almost good looking, almost intelligent, almost talented; my life has consisted of perpetually missing the train, just a few minutes late.
The excellence of a spirit is sometimes the result of mediocrity patiently defeated.
Note: Dávila was a Colombian political philosopher and in the Latin church. His aphorisms are presented here for the purposes of enjoyment, study, and historical record, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer. For more information on Dávila, see this introductory post. For information on how to live your life, go to church and read the Church Fathers/Saints.
Featured image: Antique book cover, source unknown
