Canon Quotes

• You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.

  Henry Louis Gates

  Generations, Next, Next Generation

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• We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.

  Harold Bloom

  Past, Journey, Three

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. . . . The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

  Harold Bloom

  Education, Reality, Self

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.45, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Canon law itself says for one case of guilt, a priest can be dismissed from the clerical state. One.

  Roger Mahony

  Birthday, Law, Guilt

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• Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Brain, Intuition

  Pablo Picasso (1972). “Picasso on art: a selection of views”, Viking Adult

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• The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Musical, Accumulation, Ruling

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• Let the Dean and Canons lay their heads together and the thing will be done.

  Sydney Smith

  Together, Done, Dean

  On a proposal to surround St Paul's with a wooden pavement, in H. Pearson 'The Smith of Smiths' (1934) ch. 10, p. 237

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• I have been committed to carrying out my duties... in accordance with both the letter and spirit of all applicable rules of ethics and canons of conduct.

  Samuel Alito

  Feet, Letters, Spirit

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• During the engagement I tried to throw a strong force through the canon, but I was obliged to use it elsewhere before it had gotten to the supposed location of the village.

  George Crook

  Strong, Use, Engagement

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• After the war, prompted by the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, I entered Parliament so that a priest could speak out for the poor, as canon law at that time still permitted.

  Abbe Pierre

  War, Paris, Speaks Out

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• A true servant of God will never teach a false doctrine. He will never deny new revelation. He never will tell you that the canon of scripture is full, or that the New Testament is the last revelation ever intended to be given to man.

  Orson Pratt

  Men, Servant Of God, Doctrine

  Orson Pratt (1851). “O. Pratt: A Series of Pamphlets”, p.28

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• Now, occultism is not like mystic faculty, and it very seldom works in harmony either with business aptitude in the things of ordinary life or with a knowledge of the canons of evidence in its own sphere.

  A. E. Waite

  Business, Mind, Ordinary

  A. E. Waite (2012). “The Pictorial Key to the Tarot”, p.1, Courier Corporation

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• So too, in forming a constitution, or in enacting rules of procedure, or making canons, the people do not merely passively assent, but actively cooperate. They have, in all these matters, the same authority as the clergy.

  Charles Hodge

  People, Matter, Constitution

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• I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power...power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

  Lord Acton

  Kings, Power, Men

  Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 3 April 1887, in Louise Creighton 'Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton' (1904) vol. 1, ch. 13.

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• It is often reported that the Five Points of Calvinism are the conceptual hard-core of Reformed thought. That is very misleading. The Five Points supposedly originate with the Synod of Dort in the early seventeenth century. Yet we find important Reformed leaders who were signatories to that documentation who don't think that limited atonement is the right way to think about the scope of Christ's saving work. How can this be? The answer that recent historical theology has thrown up is that the canons of the Synod don't require adherence to the doctrine of limited atonement.

  Oliver D. Crisp

  Thinking, Leader, Historical

  Source: edwardsstudies.com

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• If we read the Western Canon in order to form our social, political, or personal moral values, I firmly believe we will become monsters of selfishness and exploitation.

  Harold Bloom

  Believe, Order, Political

  Harold Bloom (2014). “The Western Canon”, p.44, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Religious canons, civil laws, are cruel; then what should war be?

  William Shakespeare

  Religious, War, Law

  William Shakespeare (2011). “Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens: Two Classical Plays”, p.196, Palgrave Macmillan

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• The Church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity.

  J. I. Packer

  Church, Newton, Gravity

  J. I. Packer (2000). “In God's Presence: Daily Devotions with J.I. Packer”, Shaw

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• The Gospel is not a mere message of deliverance, but a canon of conduct; it is not a theology to be accepted, but it is ethics to be lived. It is not to be believed only, but it is to be taken into life as a guide.

  Alexander MacLaren

  Taken, Messages, Ethics

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• Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review.

  William Kennedy

  Paris, Issues, Greek

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• One thing must be emphatically stated. The New Testament books did not become authoritative for the Church because they were formally included in a canonical list; on the contrary, the Church included them in her canon because she already regarded them as divinely inspired, recognizing their innate worth and generally apostolic authority, direct or indirect.

  F. F. Bruce

  Book, Church, Lists

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• His best-known piece is probably his "Canon in D." He also has 'Hexachordium Apollonis', which is also quite famous.

  Johann Pachelbel

  Pieces, Fame, Known

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• I am for liberty of conscience in its noblest, broadest, and highest sense. But I cannot give liberty of conscience to the pope and his followers, the papists, so long as they tell me, through all their councils, theologians, and canon laws that their conscience orders them to burn my wife, strangle my children, and cut my throat when they find their opportunity.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Children, Cutting, Opportunity

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• After decades of faithful study, ecologists have begun to fathom hidden likenesses among many interwoven systems. ...a canon of nature's laws, strategies, and principles...
  Nature runs on sunlight.
  Nature uses only the energy it needs.
  Nature fits form to function.
  Nature recycles everything.
  Nature rewards cooperation.
  Nature banks on diversity.
  Nature demands local expertise.
  Nature curbs excesses from within.
  Nature taps the power of limits.

  Janine Benyus

  Running, Nature, Law

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• I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure - like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel - can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns within us.

  Michel Leiris

  Writing, Doe, Steel

  Michel Leiris, Richard Howard (1992). “Manhood: A Journey from Childhood Into the Fierce Order of Virility”, p.105, University of Chicago Press

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