What is more important, truth or beauty? One of our most solemn duties as parents is to pass down truth to our children and to present truth in a way that is beautiful, so beautiful that they will come to love it. Be aware of what is influencing your child’s mind…and his heart. It’s easy to filter out cursing, drugs, immodesty, but what else are our kids learning from what they watch and hear? What/who is shaping their view of reality? What are they learning to love?
Here’s a few quotes on the topic of truth and beauty:
C.H. Spurgeon
The best education is education in the best things.
C.S. Lewis
If you reject aesthetic satisfactions you will fall into sensual satisfactions. (The Weight of Glory)
David Wells
[T]he family is now collapsing, not merely because of divorce but as a result of affluence and the innovations of a technological age. In a video-saturated culture in which, to play on Auden’s lines, “anguish comes by cable, /And the deadly sins can be bought in tins/With instructions on the label,” film and television now provide the sorts of values that were once provided by the family. (No Place for Truth)
Douglas Wilson
Truth is our age is so neglected, and that same truth is so important, that we think we have no time to varnish it. Just set it out there, and if the God-haters don’t like it, well, let them learn to cope. While this has a certain appeal, the problem is that the unvarnished truth is not really the truth. In a fallen world, truth cannot go out unadorned and remain what it is. “Naphtali is a deer let loose; he uses beautiful words” (Gen. 49:21). When truth is spoken apart from beauty, it is not really the truth anymore. “Let your speech always be with grace, seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer each one” (Col. 4:6). Our words are to be lovely, seasoned with salt, suited and adapted to each occasion—a believing application of Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric. Shelley was consequently speaking more wisely than he knew when he said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. We mobilize to restore decency to America through legislation, and when we are done all we have are a bunch of laws, and many times not even that. In contrast, poets and writers shape the minds of generations—whether for good or ill. (Repairing the Ruins)
Wow! I’ve not seen that Spurgeon quotation before! That’s impotant!