Quotes
Arranged chronologically by date of acquisition, beginning in the Fall of 2001.
For the newest additions, please scroll to the bottom.
I believed that the road on which I made my way would become more
honorable and more clearly marked, and at the same time more pleasant
with the aid of literary erudition, under the guidance of Thee and no one
else.
--Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance.
Most noble is that which is justest, and best is health,
but pleasantest is it to win what we love.
--Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.
Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always
planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
--Pascal, Pensees, #47.
My whole heart strives to know what the true good is in order to pursue
it: no price would be too high to pay for eternity.
--Pascal, Pensees, #229.
He that violently bloweth his nose, bringeth out blood.
--Proverbs 30:33, from Aquinas' On Law, from the Summa Theologica.
It makes no small difference, then whether we form habits of one kind or
another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather
all the difference.
--Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.
Too much and too little wine. Do not give him any, he cannot find the
truth. Give him too much; the same thing.
--Pascal, Pensees, #38.
The strongest argument for genius and learning is clarity. What a man
understands clearly, he can clearly express and thus he can pour over
into the mind of a hearer what he has in the immermost chamber of his
mind.
--Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance.
Hence in order that man come to the complete vision of blessedness it is
required beforehand that he believe God, just as a student must believe
a master who teaches him.
--Aquinas, On Faith, from the Summa Theologica.
Without faith it is impossible to please God.
--Hebrews 11:6.
The old law restrains the hand, but the New Law controls the mind. There
is little difference between the Law and the gospels, fear and love.
--Augustine, Contra Adimant. Manich. disp..
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty." --that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
--John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.
--Shakespeare, Hamlet.
How can a Christian appear as a man of literary culture to those who call
Christ, our Master and Lord, an uneducated fellow? The pupil of an
uncultured master does not easily acquire erudition unless he swerves
from his master's footsteps.
--Petrarch, On His Own Ignorance.
But seek ye first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things
will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for
tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
--Matthew 6:33-34.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in
having new eyes.
--Marcel Proust.
That which is impossible for you to accomplish by trying to fulfill all
the works of the law--many and useless as they all are--you will
accomplish easily and quickly through faith. God our Father has made all
things depend on faith so that whoever has faith will have everything,
and whoever does not have faith will have nothing. "For God has
consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all," as
it is stated in Rom. 11 [:32]. Thus the promises of God give what the
commandments of God demand and fulfill what the law prescribes so that
all things may be God's alone, both the commandments and the fulfilling
of the commandments. He alone commands, he alone fulfills. Therefore
the promises of God belong to the New Testament. Indeed, they are the
new testament.
--Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian.
But in our charitable efforts we think much more of what a man ought to
be than of what he is or what he may become; and we ruthlessly force our
own conventions and standards upon him, with a sternness which we would
consider stupid indeed did an educator use it in forcing his mature
intellectual convictions upon an undeveloped mind.
--Jane Addams, "Charitable Effort."
Meanwhile the cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday
morning. A cleft has opened in the pitiless walls of the world, and we
are invited to follow our great Captain inside. The following Him is, of
course, the essential point. That being so, it may be asked what
practical use there is in the speculations which I have been indulging. I
can think of at least one such use. It may be possible for each to think
too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for
him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The
load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour's glory should be laid daily
on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the
backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a
society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and
most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if
you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a
horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a
nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one
or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming
possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them,
that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all
friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary
people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts,
civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a
gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and
exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean
that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment
must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists
between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no
flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real
and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love
the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as
flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your
neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your
Christian neighbour he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also
Christ vere latitat--the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself,
is truly hidden.
--C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory."
"Oh, how you speak! What bold and lofty words!" cried the lady. "You
seem to pierce with your words. And yet—happiness, happiness—where is it?
Who can say of himself that he is happy? Oh, since you have been so good
as to let us see you once more today, let me tell you what I could not
utter last time, what I dared not say, all I am suffering and have been
for so long! I am suffering! Forgive me! I am suffering!?
And in a rush of fervent feeling she clasped her hands before him.
"From what specially?"
"I suffer …from lack of faith."
"Lack of faith in God?"
"Oh, no, no! I dare not even think of that. But the future life—it
is such an enigma! And no one, no one can solve it. Listen! You are a
healer, you are deeply versed in the human soul, and of course I dare not
expect you to believe me entirely, but I assure you on my word of honour
that I am not speaking lightly now. The thought of the life beyond the
grave distracts me to anguish, to terror. And I don’t know to whom to
appeal, and have not dared to all my life. And now I am so bold as to ask
you. Oh, God! What will you think of me now?"
She clasped her hands.
"Don’t distress yourself about my opinion of you," said the elder.
"I quite believe in the sincerity of your suffering."
"Oh, how thankful I am to you! You see, I shut my eyes and ask
myself if every one has faith, where did it come from? And then they do
say that it all comes from terror at the menacing phenomena of nature,
and that none of it’s real. And I say to myself, 'What if I've been
believing all my life, and when I come to die there's nothing but the
burdocks growing on my grave?' as I read in some author. It's awful!
How—how can I get back my faith? But I only believed when I was a little
child, mechanically, without thinking of anything. How, how is one to
prove it? I have come now to lay my soul before you and to ask you about
it. If I let this chance slip, no one all my life will answer me. How can
I prove it? How can I convince myself? Oh, how unhappy I am! I stand and
look about me and see that scarcely any one else cares; no one troubles
his head about it, and I'm the only one who can’t stand it. It's
deadly—deadly!"
"No doubt. But there’s no proving it, though you can be convinced of
it."
"How?"
"By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbour
actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will
grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If
you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbour,
then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your
soul. This has been tried. This is certain."
"In active love? There’s another question—and such a question! You
see, I so love humanity that—would you believe it?—I often dream of
forsaking all that I have, leaving Lise, and becoming a sister of mercy.
I close my eyes and think and dream, and at that moment I feel full of
strength to overcome all obstacles. No wounds, no festering sores could
at that moment frighten me. I would bind them up and wash them with my
own hands. I would nurse the afflicted. I would be ready to kiss such
wounds."
"It is much, and well that your mind is full of such dreams and not
others. Sometime, unawares, you may do a good deed in reality."
"Yes. But could I endure such a life for long?" the lady went on
fervently, almost frantically. "That’s the chief question—that’s my most
agonising question. I shut my eyes and ask myself, 'Would you persevere
long on that path? And if the patient whose wounds you are washing did
not meet you with gratitude, but worried you with his whims, without
valuing or remarking your charitable services, began abusing you and
rudely commanding you, and complaining to the superior authorities of you
(which often happens when people are in great suffering)—what then? Would
you persevere in your love, or not?' And do you know, I came with horror
to the conclusion that, if anything could dissipate my love to humanity,
it would be ingratitude. In short, I am a hired servant, I expect my
payment at once—that is, praise, and the repayment of love with love.
Otherwise I am incapable of loving any one."
She was in a very paroxysm of self-castigation, and, concluding, she
looked with defiant resolution at the elder.
"It's just the same story as a doctor once told me," observed the
elder. "He was a man getting on in years, and undoubtedly clever. He
spoke as frankly as you, though in jest, in bitter jest. 'I love
humanity,' he said, 'but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in
general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I
have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of
humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had
been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same
room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As
soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and
restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of
men: one because he's too long over his dinner; another because he has a
cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the
moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest
men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.'"
"But what’s to be done? What can one do in such a case? Must one
despair?"
"No. It is enough that you are distressed at it. Do what you can,
and it will be reckoned unto you. Much is done already in you since you
can so deeply and sincerely know yourself. If you have been talking to
me so sincerely, simply to gain approbation for your frankness, as you did
from me just now, then of course you will not attain to anything in the
achievement of real love; it will all get no further than dreams, and
your whole life will slip away like a phantom. In that case you will
naturally cease to think of the future life too, and will of yourself
grow calmer after a fashion in the end."
"You have crushed me! Only now, as you speak, I understand that I
was really only seeking your approbation for my sincerity when I told you
I could not endure ingratitude. You have revealed me to myself. You have
seen through me and explained me to myself!"
"Are you speaking the truth? Well, now, after such a confession, I
believe that you are sincere and good at heart. If you do not attain
happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to
leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially
falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it
every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to
yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very
fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear, too, though fear is
only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Never be frightened at
your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don’t be frightened
overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more
consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing
compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate
action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give
their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with
all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is
labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete
science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite
of all your efforts you are getting further from your goal instead of
nearer to it—at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and
behold clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time
loving and mysteriously guiding you. Forgive me for not being able to
stay longer with you. They are waiting for me. Good-bye."
--Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Wise and blessed is he who, during life, strives to be what he would like
to be when death finds him.
--Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ.
The master said, "He who learns but does not think, is lost." He who
thinks but does not learn is in great danger.
--Confucius, The Analects of Confucius.
One must know oneself. Even if that does not help in finding truth, at
least it helps in running one's life, and nothing is more proper.
--Pascal, Pensees, #72.
All our peace in this wretched world comes from our humble endurance of
suffering and not from living a life without it. He who best knows how
to suffer enjoys the greatest peace, and such a man is victor over
himself, master of the world, friend of Christ, and heir of heaven.
--Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ.
To enjoy something is to hold fast to it in love for its own sake. To
use something is to apply whatever it may be to the purpose of attaining
what you love--if indeed it is something that ought to be loved. (The
improper use of something should be termed abuse.) Suppose we were
travellers who could live happily only in our homeland and because our
absence made us unhappy we wished to put an end to our misery and return
there: we would need transport by land or sea which we could use to
travel to our homeland, the object of our enjoyment. But if we were
fascinated by the delights of the journey and the actual travelling, we
would be perversely enjoying things that we should be using; and we would
be reluctant to finish our journey quickly, being ensnared in the wrong
kind of pleasure and estranged from the homeland whose pleasures could
make us happy. So in this mortal life we are like travellers away from
our Lord [2 Cor. 5:6]: if we wish to return to the homeland where we
can be happy we must use this world [cf. I Cor. 7:31], not enjoy it, in
order to discern the invisible attributes of God, which are understood
through what has been made [Rom. 1:20] or, in other words, to derive
eternal and spiritual value from corporeal and temporal things.
--Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana.
The New Testament has a lot to say about self-denial, but not about
self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to
take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every
description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an
appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that
to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a
bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the
stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the
unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards
promised in the gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires
not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling
about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us,
like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum
because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the
sea. We are far too easily pleased.
--C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory."
At any street corner we may meet a man who offers the frantic and
blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across
somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of
course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on
the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in
the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who
doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of
old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be
convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern skeptics are
too meek to even claim their inheritance.
--G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.
...Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health;
when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has
always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He
has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the
other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods;
but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has
always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths
that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and
the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic,
like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet
sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was
such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. Thus he
believed that children were indeed the kingdom of heaven, but
nevertheless ought to be obedient to the kingdom of earth. He admired
youth because it was young and age because it was not. It is exactly
this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy
of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can
understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The
morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making
everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and
everything else becomes lucid. The determinist makes the theory of
causation quite clear, and then finds that he cannot say "if you please"
to the housemaid. The Christian permits free will to remain a sacred
mystery; but because of this his relations with the housemaid become of a
sparkling and crystal clearness. He puts the seed of dogma in a central
darkness; but it branches forth in all directions with abounding natural
health. As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness,
we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of
health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it
breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it
is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But
the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction,
can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it
has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle
returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four
winds; it is a signpost for free travellers.
Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep
matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently
well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing
which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at
everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else
by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached
intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all
moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light,
reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made
Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the
patron of poetry and the patron of healing. Of necessary dogmas and a
special creed I shall speak later. But that transcendentalism by which
all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We
are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something
both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle
of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as
the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly
reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them
all her name.
--G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.
I was not born to be free. I was born to adore and obey.
--C. S. Lewis.
"But do you really mean, Sir," said Peter, "that there could be
other worlds--all over the place, just round the corner--like that?"
"Nothing is more probable," said the Professor, taking off his
spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself,
"I wonder what they do teach them at these schools."
--C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
When I left the hospital, I resolved not to lie. Lying cuts one off.
Lying to someone is like blindfolding him: you cannot see the other's
eyes to see how he sees you and so you do not know how it stands with
yourself.
--Thomas More in Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins.
I was very depressed. I was beyond thinking about the intricate and
filthy political tangle that underlay the mess. I had given up politics
as more or less hopeless, by this time. I was no longer interested in
hearing any opinion about the movement and interplay of forces which
were all more or less iniquitous and corrupt, and it was far too laborious
and uncertain a business to try and find out some degree of truth and
justice in all the loud, artificial claims that were put forth by the
various sides.
--Thomas Merton, Seven Storey Mountain.
There is nothing fit for it: the feelings of devotion, self-sacrifice for
one's neighbor, the entire morality of self-renunciation must be taken
mercilessly to task and brought to court: likewise the aesthetics of
'disinterested contemplation' through which the emasculation of art
today tries, seductively enough, to give itself a good conscience. There
is too much sugar and sorcery in those feelings of 'for others,' of
'not for me,' for one not to have become doubly distrustful here
and ask: 'are they not perhaps--seductions?' That they
give pleasure--to him who has them, and to him who enjoys their
fruits, also to the mere spectator--does not yet furnish an argument in
their favour, but urges us rather to caution. So let us be cautious!
--Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil.
"The origins of music lie far back in the past. Music arises from
Measure and is rooted in the great Oneness. The great Oneness begets the
two poles; the two poles beget the power of Darkness and of Light.
"When the world is at peace, when all things are tranquil and all
men obey their superiors in all their courses, then music can be
perfected. When desires and passions do not turn into wrongful paths,
music can be perfected. Perfect music has its cause. It arises from
equilibrium. Equilibrium arises from righteousness, and righteousness
arises from the meaning of the cosmos. Therefore one can speak about
music only with a man who has percieved the meaning of the cosmos.
"Music is founded on the harmony between heaven and earth, on the
concord of obscurity and brightness.
"Decaying states and men ripe for doom do not, of course, lack music
either, but their music is not serene. Therefore the more tempestuous
the music, the more doleful are the people, the more imperiled the
country, the more the sovereign declines. In this way the essence of
music is lost.
"What all sacred sovereigns have loved in music was its serenity.
The tyrants Giae and Jou Sin made tempestuous music. They thought loud
sounds beautiful and massed effects interesting. They strove for new and
rare tonal effects, for notes which no ear had ever heard hitherto. They
sought to surpass each other, and overstepped all bounds...
"Therefore the music of a well-ordered age is calm and cheerful, and
so is its government. The music of a restive age is excited and fierce,
and its government is perverted. The music of a decaying state is
sentimental and sad, and its government is imperiled."
--Lu Bu We, Spring and Autumn, from Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.
While imprisoned in the shed Pierre had learned not with his intellect
but with his whole being, by life itself, that man is created for
happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple
human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from
superfluity. And now during these last three weeks of the march he had
learned still another new, consolatory truth- that nothing in this world
is terrible. He had learned that as there is no condition in which man
can be happy and entirely free, so there is no condition in which he need
be unhappy and lack freedom. He learned that suffering and freedom have
their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the
person in a bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as
he did now, sleeping on the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled
while the other was warming; and that when he had put on tight dancing
shoes he had suffered just as he did now when he walked with bare feet
that were covered with sores- his footgear having long since fallen to
pieces. He discovered that when he had married his wife- of his own free
will as it had seemed to him- he had been no more free than now when they
locked him up at night in a stable. Of all that he himself subsequently
termed his sufferings, but which at the time he scarcely felt, the worst
was the state of his bare, raw, and scab-covered feet. (The horseflesh
was appetizing and nourishing, the saltpeter flavor of the gunpowder they
used instead of salt was even pleasant; there was no great cold, it was
always warm walking in the daytime, and at night there were the
campfires; the lice that devoured him warmed his body.) The one thing
that was at first hard to bear was his feet.
--Tolstoy, War and Peace.
The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection
of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you;
laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all
young persons take their choice.
--William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair.
Some time after this interview it happened that Mr. Cuff, on a sunshiny
afternoon, was in the neighborhood of poor William Dobbin, who was lying
under a tree in the playground, spelling over a favorite copy of the
Arabian Nights which he had--apart from the rest of the school,
who were pursuing their various sports--quite lonely, and almost happy.
If people would but leave children to themselves; if teachers would cease
to bully them; if parents would not insist upon directing their thoughts,
and dominating their feelings--those feelings and thoughts which are a
mystery to all (for how much do you and I know of each other, of our
children, of our fathers, of our neighbor, and how far more beautiful and
sacred are the thoughts of the poor lad or girl whom you govern likely to
be, than those of the dull and world-corrupted person who rules
him?)--if, I say, parents and masters would leave their children alone a
little more,--small harm would accrue, although a less quantity of
as in proesenti might be acquired.
--William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair.
A commitment is a moment of freedom that endures. Free choices are words
that are sung. In commitments we hold the note; the choice continues,
our moment of freedom is prolonged. Our commitments--the truths we
choose to believe, the ideals we choose to embrace, the directions we
choose to live by--these are the enduring choices that shape our souls,
make us the persons we are and determine the true meaning of our names.
--Father David Knight, via Claire Hoipkemier.
Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of
mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's gurgling track, pushed her on
like giants' palms outspread. The strong unstaggering breeze abounded so,
that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed
before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was
only known by the spread intensity of his place; where his bayonet rays
moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and
queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten
gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.
--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick.
Man, please thy maker, and be merry,
And give not for this world a cherry.
--Dunbar, from C.S. Lewis' The Four Loves.
For us with the standard of good and evil given us by Christ no human
actions are incommensurable. And there is no greatness where simplicity,
goodness, and truth are absent.
--Tolstoy, War and Peace.
[The attempt in obedience to follow Christ] does not consist in engaging
in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living
mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make
sense if God did not exist.
--Cardinal Suhard, from Dorothy Day's By Little, and By Little.
Meg, if we lived in a state where virtue was profitable common sense
would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live
animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in
fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust, and stupidity
commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and
thought, and have to choose to be human at all, why then perhaps we must
stand fast a little, even at the risk of being heroes.
--Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, from Brennan
Manning's The Ragimuffin Gospel.
It is generally supposed that Conservatives are usually old people, and
that those in favour of change are the young. That is not quite
correct. Usually Conservatives are young people: those who want to live
but who do not think about how to live, and have not time to think, and
therefore take as a model for themselves a way of life that they have seen.
--Tolstoy, "The Devil".
America is the most democratic country in the world, and it is at the
same time (according to reports worthy of belief) the country in which
the Roman Catholic religion makes most progress. At first sight this is
surprising.
Two things must here be accurately distinguished: equality makes men want
to form their own opinions; but, on the other hand, it imbues them with
the taste and the idea of unity, simplicity, and impartiality in the
power that governs society. Men living in democratic times are therefore
very prone to shake off all religious authority; but if they consent to
subject themselves to any authority of this kind, they choose at least
that it should be single and uniform. Religious powers not radiating from
a common center are naturally repugnant to their minds; and they almost
as readily conceive that there should be no religion as that there should
be several.
At the present time, more than in any preceding age, Roman Catholics are
seen to lapse into infidelity, and Protestants to be converted to Roman
Catholicism. If you consider Catholicism within its own organization, it
seems to be losing; if you consider it from outside, it seems to be
gaining. Nor is this difficult to explain. The men of our days are
naturally little disposed to believe; but as soon as they have any
religion, they immediately find in themselves a latent instinct that
urges them unconsciously towards Catholicism. Many of the doctrines and
practices of the Roman Catholic Church astonish them, but they feel a
secret admiration for its discipline, and its great unity attracts them.
If Catholicism could at length withdraw itself from the political
animosities to which it has given rise, I have hardly any doubt but that
the same spirit of the age which appears to be so opposed to it would
become so favorable as to admit of its great and sudden advancement.
One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to
reconcile contrary principles and to purchase peace at the expense of
logic. Thus there have ever been and will ever be men who, after having
submitted some portion of their religious belief to the principle of
authority, will seek to exempt several other parts of their faith from it
and to keep their minds floating at random between liberty and obedience.
But I am inclined to believe that the number of these thinkers will be
less in democratic than in other ages, and that our posterity will tend
more and more to a division into only two parts, some relinquishing
Christianity entirely and others returning to the Church of Rome.
--Alexis DeTocqueville, Democracy in America.
Communists and capitalists alike, "liberal" and conservative capitalists
alike, have needed to replace religion with some form of determinism, so
that they can say to their victims, "I am doing this because I can't do
otherwise. It is not my fault. It is inevitable." The wonder is how
often organized religion has gone along with this lie.
--Wendel Berry, "The Idea of a Local Economy".
There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to
all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one
must live in the needs of the day--that is, forget onesself. To forget
himself in a sleep was impossible now, at least till nighttime; he could
not go back now to the music sung by the decanter-women; so he must
forget himself in the dream of daily life.
--Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
"It's this, don't you see," said Stepan Arkadyevitch, "you're very much
all of a piece. That's your strong point and your failing. You have a
character that's all of a piece, and you want the whole of life to be of
a piece too--but that's not how it is. You despise public official work
because you want the reality to be invariably corresponding all the
while with the aim--and that's not how it is. You want a man's work,
too, always to have a defined aim, and love and family life always to be
undivided--and that's not how it is. All the variety, all the charm, all
the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow."
--Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
"Why you fool, it's the educated reader that can be gulled.
All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman
who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all
propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the
football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of
windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have
to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the
highbrow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already.
They'll believe anything."
--Fairy Hardcastle, from C. S. Lewis' That Hideous Strength.
Happy love has no history. Romance only comes into existence where love
is fatal, frowned upon, doomed by life itself. What stirs the lyrical
poets to their finest flights is neither the delight of the senses nor
the fruitful contentment of the settled couples; not the satisfaction of
love, but its passion. And passion means suffering. There we have the
fundamental fact.
--Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World.
...for haste denies all acts their dignity.
--Dante, Purgatorio.
"Love--love is everything! Anybody can carry a candle in a procession or
give money to the collection--that is nothing. The only thing that
counts is to be joyful at all times with what we receive from God's
hands. That is love!"
--Saint Francis, from Felix Timmermans' The Perfect Joy of Saint Francis.
I believe that the most lawless and inordinate loves are less contrary to
God's will than a self-invited and self-protective lovelessness. It is
like hiding the talent in a napkin and for much the same reason "I knew
that thou wert a hard man." Christ did not teach and suffer that we
might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own
happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds
whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he
has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the
sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them
to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be
broken, and if he chooses this as that way in which they should break, so
be it.
--C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves.
The burning conviction that we have a holy duty towards others is often a
way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like
giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy
duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt
that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously
in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice
utmost humility, is boundless.
--Eric Hoffer, The True Believer.
Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we
have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many
things than when we seem to lack but one thing.
--ibid.
Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners and contempt for
authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love to chatter in
all places of exercise. They no longer rise when elders enter the room;
they contradict their parents before company, gobble up their food, and
tyrannize their teachers.
--Socrates.
In leisure--not only there, but certainly there, if anywhere--the
truly human is rescued and preserved precisely because the area of the
"just human" is left behind over and over again--and this is not brought
about through the application of extreme efforts but rather as with a
kind of "moving away" (and this "moving" is of course more difficult than
the extreme, active effort; it is "more difficult" because it is less at
one's own disposal; the condition of utmost exertion is more easily to
be realized than the condition of relaxation and detachment, even
though the latter is effortless: this is the paradox that reigns over
the attainment of liesure, which is at once a human and super-human
condition). As Aristotle said of it: "man cannot live this way insofar
as he is man, but only insofar as something divine dwells in him."
--Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture.
This is the main question, with what activity one's leisure is filled.
--Aristotle, Politics, from Josef Pieper's Leisure the Basis of Culture.
Pierre glanced up at the sky and the twinkling stars in the faraway depths.
"And all that is me, all that is within me, and it is all I!" thought Pierre.
"And they caught all that and put it into a shed boarded up with planks!"
He smiled, and went and lay down to sleep beside his companions.
--Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace.
When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport; when the tiger
wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity.
--George Bernard Shaw via. Kaitlyn Dudley.
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
--G.K. Chesterton.
To be clever enough to get all the money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
--G.K. Chesterton.
Posting a letter and getting married are among the few things left that are
entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic, a thing must be irrevocable.
--G.K. Chesterton.
Angels fly because they take themselves lightly.
--G.K. Chesterton.
As from afar the magic notes of Mozart's music still gently haunt me.
Thus does our soul retain these fair impressions, which no time, no
circumstances can efface, and they lighten our existence. They show us
in the darkness of this life a bright, clear, lovely distance, for which
we hope with confidence. O Mozart, immortal Mozart, how many, oh how
endlessly many such comforting perceptions of a brighter and better life
hast thou brought to our souls.
--from Schubert's diary, dated 13 June 1816, via Hannah Mowrey.
What I wear is pants. What I do is live. How I pray is breathe. Who said
Zen? Wash out your mouth if you said Zen. If you see a meditation going
by, shoot it. Who said, "Love?" Love is in the movies. The spiritual life
is something that people worry about when they are so busy with something
else they think they ought to be spiritual. Spiritual life is guilt. Up
here in the woods is seen the New Testament: that is to say, the wind
comes through the trees and you breathe it.
--Thomas Merton, Day of a Stranger, via Erica Hayman.
He's writing because someone asked him to keep a journal that would
respond to the question of what his daily spiritual life is like.
--E to the B to point no faking, cooking MC's like a pound of bacon.
If you are going to get anywhere in life you have to read a lot of books.
--Roald Dahl.
Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in
the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your
perfect little children in your beautiful little house where you have no
gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning
to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.
--Rich Mullins.
The challenge is to make every second count. It is easy to become
complacent, to be willing to accept less than one's best, or to put off
giving one's best until another time. We all know that feeling when we
let those paper deadlines slowly creep up on us. 'Oh, I still have a week
... a day ... an hour ...' But what these close calls and all-nighters
have taught us is that we can come through when we need to. These
instances show us that our best is there, waiting to be tapped. Now, it
becomes our challenge to harness it so that giving our best is not a rare
event, it is a way of living. No matter the task, or the outcome, the
work itself helps us grow. It is our continual choice to say yes to what
we could be that makes us who we are.
--Timothy Cordes, from his 1998 Notre Dame Valedictory address. He is
the second blind person ever to be accepted to an American medical school.
...I leave you with this challenge: serve a neighbor in need. Because a
life of service is a life of significance. Because materialism,
ultimately, is boring, and consumerism can build a prison of wants.
Because a person who is not responsible for others is a person who is
truly alone. Because there are few better ways to express our love for
America than to care for other Americans. And because the same God who
endows us with individual rights also calls us to social obligations.
...Your calling is not easy, because you must do the acting and the
caring. But there is fulfillment in that sacrifice which creates hope for
the rest of us. Every life you help proves that every life might be
helped. The actual proves the possible, and hope is always the beginning
of change.
--George W. Bush, from his 2001 Notre Dame Commencement address.
We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he was born of the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in fulfillment of the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
--The Nicene Creed.
...To whom thus Michael. "Judge not what is best
By pleasure, though to nature seeming meet,
Created, as thou art, to nobler end
Holy and pure, conformity divine.
Those tents thou saw'st so pleasant, were the tents
Of wickedness, wherein shall dwell his race
Who slew his brother; studious they appear
Of arts that polish life, inventors rare,
Unmindful of their maker, though his spirit
Taught them, but they his gifts acknowledged none.
Yet they a beauteous offspring shall beget;
For that fair female troop thou saw'st, that seemed
Of goddesses, so blithe, so smooth, so gay,
Yet empty of all good wherein consists
Woman's domestic honor and chief praise;
Bred only and completed to the taste
Of lustful appetence, to sing, to dance,
To dress, and troll the tongue, and roll the eye.
To these that sober race of men, whose lives
Religious titled them the Sons of God,
Shall yield up all their virtue, all their fame
Ignobly, to the trains and to the smiles
Of these fair atheists, and now swim in joy,
(Erelong to swim at large) and laugh; for which
The world erelong a world of tears must weep."
To whom thus Adam of short joy bereft.
"O pity and shame, that they who to live well
Entered so fair, should turn aside to tread
Paths indirect, or in the mid way faint!
But still I see the tenor of man's woe
Holds on the same, from woman to begin."
"From man's effeminate slackness it begins,"
Said th' angel, "who should better hold his place
By wisdom, and superior gifts received.
But now prepare thee for another scene."
--John Milton, Paradise Lost.
"What do you do?" she asked. She was a tall bony woman, resembling
the mop she carried upside-down.
He said he was a preacher.
The woman looked at him thoroughly and then she looked behind him at
his car. "What church?" she asked.
He said the Church Without Christ.
"Protestant?" she asked suspiciously, "or something foriegn?"
He said no mam, it was Protestant.
After a minute she said, "Well, you can look at it," and he followed
her into a white plastered hall and up some steps at the side of it....
--Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood.
It must be recognized that our faith in progress and the unique value of
human experience rests on religious foundations, and that they cannot be
severed from historical religion and used as a substitute for it, as men
have attempted to do during the last two centuries.
--G.K. Chesterton, Progress and Religion, from the Notre Dame
Center for Ethics and Culture website.
In fact, to this very day, common sense in religion is rare, and we are
too often trying to be heroic instead of just ordinarily good and kind.
--Dorothy Day, Dorothy Day: A Biography, from the Notre Dame
Center for Ethics and Culture website.
We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.
We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form,
saying, "We need bread." We could not say, "Go, be thou filled." If there
were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was
always bread.
We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those
who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And
somehow the walls expanded.
We were just sitting there talking and someone said, "Let's all go live
on a farm."
It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just
happened.
I found myself, a barren woman, the joyful mother of children. It is not
easy always to be joyful, to keep in mind the duty of delight.
The most significant thing about The Catholic Worker is poverty, some say.
The most significant thing is community, others say. We are not alone any
more.
But the final word is love. At times it has been, in the words of Father
Zossima, a harsh and dreadful thing, and our very faith in love has been
tried through fire.
We cannot love God unless we love each other, and to love we must know
each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other
in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone any more. Heaven is a
banquet and life is a banquet, too, even with a crust, where there is
companionship.
We have all know the long loneliness and we have learned that the only
solution is love and that love comes in community.
It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.
--Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness.
At this moment, humanity should question itself, once more, about the
absurd and always unfair phenomenon of war, on whose stage of death and
pain only remain standing the negotiating table that could and should
have prevented it.
--John Paul II, Upon arriving in Buenos Aires, June 11, 1982,after the
Falklands War, from the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture website.
Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in
doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.
--Pope John Paul II, from an homily in Orioles Park at Camden Yards,
October 9, 1995, from the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture website.
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.
Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations - these are mortal, and their life
is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with,
work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting
splendors. ... Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the
holiest object presented to your senses.
--C. S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory."
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only
because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
--C. S. Lewis, "Is Theology Poetry?", from the Notre Dame Center for
Ethics and Culture website.
Every work of art reaches man in his inner powers. It reaches him more
profoundly and insidiously than any rational proposition, either cogent
demonstration or sophistry. For it strikes him with two terrible weapons,
Intuition and Beauty, and at the single root in him of all his
energies... Art and Poetry awaken the dreams of man, and his longings,
and reveal to him some of the abysses he has in himself.
--Jacques Maritain, "The Responsibility of the Artist," from the Notre
Dame Center for Ethics and Culture website.
Christianity taught men that love is worth more than intelligence.
--Jacques Maritain, "Art and Scholasticism," from the Notre Dame Center
for Ethics and Culture website.
We are not the same persons this year as last; nor are those we love. It
is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person.
--Jacques Maritain, "Art and Scholasticism," from the Notre Dame Center
for Ethics and Culture website.
The world passes. It is but a pageant and a scene. The lofty palace
crumbles. The busy city is mute. The ships of Tharsis have sped away.
On heart and flesh, death is coming. The veil is breaking. Departing soul,
how have you used your talents, your opportunities, the light poured
'round you, the warnings given you, the grace inspired in you?
--Jacques Maritain, Discourses to Mixed Congregations, Discourse 6,
from the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture website.
For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to
learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort
spent in vain.
--Dorothy Sayers, "The Lost Tools of Learning," from the Notre Dame
Center for Ethics and Culture website.
Where there is a deep, simple, all embracing love of man, of the created
world of living and inanimate things, then there will be respect for
life, for freedom, for truth, for justice, and there will be humble love
of God. But where there is not love of man, no love of life, then make
all the laws you want, all the edicts and treaties, issue all the
anathemas, set up all the safeguards and inspections, fill the air with
spying satellites, and hang cameras on the moon. As long as you see your
fellowman as a being essentially to be feared, mistrusted, hated, and
destroyed, there cannot be peace on earth.
--Thomas Merton, Pacem in Terris, via Naim Stifan Ateek.
The fruit of silence is prayer.
The fruit of prayer is faith.
The fruit of faith is love.
The fruit of love is service.
The fruit of service is peace.
--Mother Teresa.
The tragic beauty of the face of Christ
shines in the face of man;
the abandoned old live on
in shabby rooms, far from inner comfort.
Outside, in the street
din and purpose, the world like a fiery animal
reined in by youth. Within
a pallid tiring heart
shuffles about its dwelling.
Nothing, or so little, come of life's promise.
Out of broken men, despised minds
what does one make--
a roadside show, a graveyard of the heart?
The Christian God reproves
faithless ranting minds
crushing like upper and lower stones
all life between;
Christ, fowler of street and hedgerow
of cripples and the distempered old
--eyes blind as woodknots,
tongues tight as immigrants--
takes in His gospel net
all the hue and cry of existence.
Heaven, of such imperfection,
wary, ravaged, wild?
Yes. Compel them in.
--Daniel Berrigan SJ, The Face of Christ.
Live on earth as a pilgrim and a stranger, unconcerned with the world's
business. Let your heart remain free and lifted up to God, for you have
not here a lasting city. Persevere in prayer, sending your apirations
daily up to God, so that at the hour of death your soul may depart from
this world and go to its Lord.
--Thomas a Kempis, Imitatio Christi.
I long for no other treasure but love, for it alone can make us pleasing
to God.
--St. Therese of Lisieux
Jesus does not demand great deeds. All He wants is self-surrender and
gratitude.
--ibid.
Oh me! Oh life! Of the
questions of these
recurring.
Of the endless
train of the faithless.
Of the cities filled
with the foolish.
Of myself forever
reproaching myself,
for who more foolish
than I, and who more faithless.
Of eyes that vainly
crave the light of
objects mean. Of
the struggle ever
renewed.
Of the poor results
of all. Of the plodding
and sordid crowds
I see around me.
Of the empty and
useless years of the
rest, with the rest
me intertwined.
Of the question,
oh me, so sad,
recurring.
What good amid
these, oh me,
oh life?
Answer: that you are
here, that life exists,
and identity.
That the powerful
play goes on, and
you may contribute
a verse.
--Walt Whitman, via Mike Downs.
Don't use the telephone.
People are never ready
to answer it.
Use poetry.
--Jack Kerouac, To Edward Dahlberg.
But then they danced down the streets like dingledoodles, and I shambled
after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me,
because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to
live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn,
burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the
stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everyone
does "Awww!"
--Jack Kerouac, On the Road, via Allison Ricci.
Because there is global insecurity, nations are engaged in a mad arms
race, spending billions of dollars wastefully on instruments of
destruction, when millions are starving. And yet, just a fraction of what
is expended so obscenely on defense budgets would make the difference in
enabling God's children to fill their stomachs, be educated, and given
the chance to lead fulfilled and happy lives. We have the capacity to
feed ourselves several times over, but we are daily haunted by the
spectacle of the gaunt dregs of humanity shuffling along in endless
queues, with bowls to collect what the charity of the world has provided,
too little too late. When will we learn, when will the people of the
world get up and say, Enough is enough. God created us for fellowship.
God created us so that we should form the human family, existing together
because we were made for one another. We are not made for an exclusive
self-sufficiency but for interdependence, and we break the law of our
being at our peril. When will we learn that an escalated arms race merely
escalates global insecurity? We are now much closer to a nuclear
holocaust than when our technology and our spending were less.
--Desmond Tutu's Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
DOUGLAS. Hey... boy... gosh. (He looks up, studies the sun.) The
sun... Clouds and wind... wind blowing the trees... and the grass...
right on up to... my feet... (He looks down at his feet.) And
right on up my ankles, and my legs... and... heck... my wrists... my
fingers. (He holds his fingers out in the air, stretched as if he
might fly.) And the wind blowing my hair... and feel it on my chin
and... it's in my nose and going along my eyebrows and I can feel every
hair on my arms and in my ears and... There's a rabbit running, running,
running... closer... nearer. No! Here! No rabbit... but... MY HEART!
(We hear his heart beat and burst into sound.) And not just one
heart, but another, in my throat, and here in my ears and my wrists! My
gosh. I'm... ALIVE! (He turns in a great circle, he runs, stops,
eyes shut.) Whyn't someone tell me before! ALIVE! (He opens
his eyes to stare around as if he cannot stare enough, see enough,
hear enough, touch enough.) Sky! Trees! Grass. (Stomps grass.)
Clover, Dandelions! Where'll I run? Here!? No, there! What
do I grab next? What do I listen for? and smell? or hear what?
Taste. Sweat on my hand! Salt! Feel. A billion goose bumps all over
my skin! A billion hairs on my body, all tickling! Air steam-locomoting
my lungs! What's going ON? (Shakes hand with himself.) ALIVE!
--Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine.
Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere.
The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; he who has
learned to die, has unlearned to serve. There is nothing of evil in life,
for him who rightly comprehends that the privation of life is no evil: to
know how to die, delivers us from all subjection and constraint.
--Montaigne, "That to Study Philosophy is to Learn to Die."
Conviction without experience makes for harshness.
--Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being, via Cindy Mongrain.
If china, then only the kind
you wouldn't miss under the movers' shoes or the treads of a tank;
if a chair then one that's not too comfortable, or
you'll regret getting up and leaving;
if clothes, then only what will fit in one suitcase;
if books, then those you know by heart;
if plans, then the ones you can give up
when it come time for the next move,
to another street, another continent or epoch
or world:
Who told you you could settle in?
Who told you this or that would last forever?
Didn't anyone tell you you'll never
in the world
feel at home here?
--Stanislaw Baranczar, via Paul Mitchell.
Flee fro the prees and dwelle with sothfastnesse;
Suffyce unto thy thyng, though hit be smal...
However just and anxious I have been,
I will stop and step back
from the crowd of those who may agree
with what I say, and be apart.
There is no earthly promise of life or peace
but where the roots branch and weave
their patient silent passages in the dark;
uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.
I am not bound for any public place,
but for ground of my own
where I have planted vines and orchard trees,
and in the heat of the day climbed up
into the healing shadow of the woods.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn
and pick dew-wet red berries in a cup.
--Wendell Berry, A Standing Ground.
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves--goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is—
Chríst—for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins, 34. 'As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame'.
CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ' ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed ' dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks ' treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ' nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest ' to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, ' his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig ' nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ' death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time ' beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ' joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ' Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ' world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins, 48. That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort
of the Resurrection.
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et
benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro
nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.
--The Church.
Do not ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. For what
the world needs is more people who have come alive.
--Howard Thurman, via David Nordin.
Let us love God, my friends, but let it be with the strength of our arms
and the sweat of our brows.
--St. Vincent de Paul, via David Nordin.
Do we live together to make money from each other or do we live together
because we love each other?
--T.S. Eliot, "The Rock," via David Nordin.
Follow Me.
--Jesus, Mt. 4:19, Mt. 8:22, Mt 10:38, Mt 16:24, Mt. 19:21, Mk. 1:17,
Mk 2:14, Mk. 8:34, Mk. 10:21, Lk. 5:27, Lk. 9:23, Lk. 9:59, Lk. 14:27,
Lk. 18:22, Jn. 1:43, Jn. 10:27, Jn 10:26, Jn 21:19, Jn. 21:22, via David Nordin.
The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but
what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and
self-destruction! For the world says: "You have desires and so satisfy
them, for you have the same rights as the most rich and powerful. Don't
be afraid of satisfying them and even multiply your desires." That is the
modern doctrine of the world. In that they see freedom. And what follows
from this right of multiplication of desires? In the rich, isolation and
spiritual suicide; in the poor, envy and murder; for they have been given
rights, but have not been shown the means of satisfying their wants...
Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of
desires, men distort their own nature, for many senseless and foolish
desires and habits and ridiculous fancies are fostered in them. They live
only for mutual envy, for luxury and ostentation. To have dinner visits,
carriages, rank, and slaves to wait on one is looked upon as a necessity,
for which life, honour and human feeling are sacrificed, and men even
commit suicide if they are unable to satisfy it. We see the same thing
among those who are not rich, while the poor drown their unsatisfied need
and their envy in drunkenness. But soon they will drink blood instead of
wine, they are being led on to it. I ask you is such a man free? I knew
one "champion of freedom" who told me himself that, when he was deprived
of tobacco in prison, he was so wretched at the privation that he almost
went and betrayed his cause for the sake of getting tobacco again! And
such a man says, "I am fighting for the cause of humanity." How can such
a one fight? What is he fit for? He is capable perhaps of some action
quickly over, but he cannot hold out long. And it's no wonder that
instead of gaining freedom they have sunk into slavery, and instead of
serving the cause of brotherly love and the union of humanity have
fallen, on the contrary, into dissension and isolation... And therefore
the idea of the service of humanity, of brotherly love and the solidarity
of mankind, is more and more dying out in the world, and indeed this idea
is sometimes treated with derision. For how can a man shake off his
habits? What can become of him if he is in such bondage to the habit of
satisfying the innumerable desires he has created for himself? He is
isolated, and what concern has he with the rest of humanity? They have
succeeded in accumulating a greater mass of objects, but the joy in the
world has grown less.
The monastic way is very different. Obedience, fasting, and prayer are
laughed at, yet only through them lies the way to real, true freedom. I
cut off my superfluous and unnecessary desires, I subdue my proud and
wanton will and chastise it with obedience, and with God's help I attain
freedom of spirit and with it spiritual joy. Which is most capable of
conceiving a great idea and serving it- the rich in his isolation or the
man who has freed himself from the tyranny of material things and habits?
The monk is reproached for his solitude, "You have secluded yourself
within the walls of the monastery for your own salvation, and have
forgotten the brotherly service of humanity!" But we shall see which will
be most zealous in the cause of brotherly love. For it is not we, but
they, who are in isolation, though they don't see that. Of old, leaders
of the people came from among us, and why should they not again? The same
meek and humble ascetics will rise up and go out to work for the great
cause. The salvation of Russia comes from the people.
--Fr. Zossima, via Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, via David Nordin.
I have always been a quarter of an hour before my time, and it has made a man of me.
--Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, Knight of Bath.
We cannot rest content in ourselves. In the elements and experiences of
our life, to which we give meaning, we do not find satisfying light and
protective security. We only find these things in the intangible mystery
that overshadows our heart from the first day of our lives, awakening
questions and wonderment and luring us beyond ourselves. We surrender
ourselves to this mystery, as a person in love surrenders to the mystery
of the beloved and there finds rest. We are creatures whose being is
sheltered and protected only insofar as we open ourselves up to
intangible, greater realities. We are at peace in the open, unconquered
precincts of mystery.
--Johannes Baptist Metz, Poverty of Spirit.
When someone says to us in the midst of a crisis, "I do not know what to
say or what to do, but I want you to realize that I am with you, that I
will not leave you alone," we have a friend through whom we can find
consolation and comfort. In a time so filled with methods and techniques
designed to change people, to influence their behavior, and to make them
do new things and think new thoughts, we have lost the simple but
difficult gift of being present to each other. We have lost this gift
because we have been led to believe that presence must be useful....
Meanwhile, we have forgotten that it is often in "useless,"
unpretentious, humble presence to each other that we feel consolation
and comfort. Simply being with someone is difficult because it asks of us
that we share in the other's vulnerability, enter with him or her into
the experience of weakness and powerlessness, become part of the
uncertainty, and give up control and self-determination. And still,
whenever this happens, new strength and new hope is being born.
--Nouwen, McNeill, Morrison, Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life,
via Christine Donovan.
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
--Wendell Berry, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front."
Love all of God's creation, love the whole, and love each grain of sand.
Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love animals, love plants,
love every kind of thing. If you love every kind of thing, then
everywhere God's mystery will reveal itself to you. Once this has been
revealed to you, you will begin to understand it ever more deeply with
each passing day. And finally you will be able to love the whole world
with an all-encompassing universal love. Love animals. God gave them the
beginnings of thought and a sense of untroubled joy. Do not disturb
this, do not torment them, do not take away their joy, do not oppose
God's intent. Man, set not thyself above the animals. They are without
sin, it is you in your grandeur who is fouling the earth by your presence
on it and leaving your foul mark behind you--alas, this goes for nearly
every one of us! [. . .] My brother, young though he was, asked the
little birds for pardon: that might seem senseless, but he was right,
because everything is like an ocean, everything flows and intermingles,
you only have to touch it in one place and it will reverberate in another
part of the world.
--Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, via Felipe Witchger.
It's incredible how long science has succeeded in keeping men's minds off
their fundamental unhappiness and its own very limited power to remedy
their fundamental unhappiness. One marvel follows another -- electric
light, phonograph, motor car, telephone, radio, airplane, television.
It's a curious list, and very pathetic. The soul of man is crying for
hope of purpose or meaning; and the scientist says, 'Here is a telephone'
or 'Look, television!' -- exactly as one tries to distract a baby crying
for its mother by offering it sugar sticks and making funny faces.
--Frank Sheed, via Archbishop Charles Chaput, via Kevin Haley.
Art is that work and that way of working in which man uses his free will. A
civilization, based upon the doctrine of free will naturally and inevitably produces
artists. In such a civilization, all men are artists, and so there is no need to talk
about it.
--Eric Gill, "Idiocy or Ill Will."
The devil doesn't kill people. He sows fear so that people will
kill each other.
--Nathan Stone, S.J..
There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them
except in the form of bread.
--Mahatma Gandhi, via Gabriel Robins.
Many wealthy people are little more than janitors of their possessions.
--Frank Lloyd Wright, via Gabriel Robins.
I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great
ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
--Sir Winston Churchill, via Gabriel Robins.
It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.
- Oscar Wilde, via Gabriel Robins.
Happiness is good health and a bad memory.
--Ingrid Bergman, via Gabriel Robins.
Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
--Henry David Thoreau, via Gabriel Robins.
Men have become the tools of their tools.
--Henry David Thoreau, via Gabriel Robins.
A pint of sweat saves a gallon of blood.
--General George S. Patton, via Gabriel Robins.
Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist
the black flag, and begin slitting throats.
--Henry Louis Mencken, via Gabriel Robins.
Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run.
--Rudyard Kipling, via Gabriel Robins.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who
cannot read them.
- Mark Twain, via Gabriel Robins.
We only do well the things we like doing.
--Colette, Prisons and Paradise, via www.quotationspage.com.
Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency.
Nothing is that important.
--Natalie Goldberg, via www.quotationspage.com.
Oh man, learn to dance, or the angels in heaven will not know what to do
with you.
--St. Augustine, via Claire Hoipkemier.
i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april
my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness
around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains
i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing
winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)
--e.e. cummings, i am a little church(no great cathedral).
The new vision of woman that Mary inspires by her presence in our
history, constitutes a vital opportunity to establish a truly free
world... Woman, fashioned after this model, transcending the species and
attracting man by the light of her inner life, might suggest a real
answer to the condition of contemporary humanity. She can reveal to the
man the highest spheres of his own being by embodying the perpetual need
to surpass himself. We cannot hope to find a human solution to all the
problems facing us as long as we fail to recognize our capacity for the
infinite, a capacity that unhinges us when it cannot be actualized in a
field of expansion as vast as its potential.
Every child, said a poet, dreams of his mother as immaculate... Without
his knowing it, the Blessed Virgin is thus his dream come true.
--Father Maurice Zundel, via Andy Zengel.
It is Jesus in fact that you seek when you dream of happiness, he is
waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; he is the
beauty to which you are so attracted; it is he who provokes you with that
thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is he
who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is he who reads in
your hearts your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to
stifle. It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great
with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow
yourselves to be grounded down by mediocrity, the courage to commit
yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society,
making the world more human and more fraternal.
--John Paul II, via Quinn Pillari.
I.
Immortal Love, author of this great frame,
Sprung from that beauty which can never fade;
How hath man parcel'd out thy glorious name,
And thrown it on that dust which thou hast made,
While mortal love doth all the title gain!
Which siding with invention, they together
Bear all the sway, possessing heart and brain,
(Thy workmanship) and give Thee share in neither.
Wit fancies beauty, beauty raiseth wit:
The world is theirs; they two play out the game,
Thou standing by: and though thy glorious name
Wrought our deliverance from th' infernal pit,
Who sings thy praise? only a scarf or glove
Doth warm our hands, and make them write of love.
II.
Immortal Heat, O let thy greater flame
Attract the lesser to it: let those fires
Which shall consume the world, first make it tame,
And kindle in our hearts such true desires,
As may consume our lusts, and make Thee way.
Then shall our hearts pant Thee; then shall our brain
All her invention on thine Altar lay,
And there in hymns send back thy fire again:
Our eyes shall see Thee, which before saw dust;
Dust blown by wit, till that they both were blind:
Thou shalt recover all thy goods in kind,
Who wert disseized by usurping lust:
All knees shall bow to Thee; all wits shall rise,
And praise Him who did make and mend our eyes.
III.
Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack'd anything.
"A guest," I answer'd, "worthy to be here";
Love said, "You shall be he."
"I, the unkind, the ungrateful? ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee."
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
"Who made the eyes but I?"
"Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them; let my shame
Go where it doth deserve."
"And know you not," says Love, "who bore the blame?"
"My dear, then I will serve."
"You must sit down," says Love, "and taste my meat."
So I did sit and eat.
--George Herbert, via Michael Baxter.
And there will be much work to do. But I have faith in you, and that is
why I am sending you. With you is Christ. Cherish him and he will cherish
you. You will behold great woe and in that woe you will be happy. Here is
my behest to you: in woe seek happiness. Work, work untiringly.
--Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
We are talking of peace. These are things that break peace, but I feel
the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a
direct war, a direct killing - direct murder by the mother herself.
And we read in the Scripture, for God says very clearly: Even if a
mother could forget her child - I will not forget you - I have
carved you in the palm of my hand. We are carved in the palm of His
hand, so close to Him that unborn child has been carved in the hand
of God. And that is what strikes me most, the beginning of that
sentence, that even if a mother could forget something impossible -
but even if she could forget - I will not forget you. And today the
greatest means - the greatest destroyer of peace is abortion.
...Because if a mother can kill her own child - what is left for me
to kill you and you kill me - there is nothing between. And this I
appeal in India, I appeal everywhere: Let us bring the child back,...
We are fighting abortion by adoption, we have saved thousands of
lives, we have sent words to all the clinics, to the hospitals,
police stations - please don't destroy the child, we will take the
child. So every hour of the day and night it is always somebody, we
have quite a number of unwedded mothers - tell them come, we will
take care of you, we will take the child from you, and we will get a
home for the child. And we have a tremendous demand from families
who have no children, that is the blessing of God for us. And also,
we are doing another thing which is very beautiful - we are teaching
our beggars, our leprosy patients, our slum dwellers, our people of
the street, natural family planning.
--Mother Teresa, from her Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Lecture.
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall
be well.
-Julian of Norwich, via Rick Becker.
Intelligence is nothing without delight.
--Paul Claudel, via Rick Becker.
All reality is iconoclastic.
--C. S. Lewis, via Rick Becker.
For, what pride can be cured, if it is not cured by the humility of the
Son of God? What anger can be cured, if it is not cured by the patience
of the Son of God? What ungodliness can be cured, if it is not cured by
the charity of the Son of God? Finally, what want of courage can be
cured, if not by the resurrection of the body?
--St. Augustine, On Christian Combat, via James Son of Thunder Lee.
O Medicine, making provision for all: deflating what is distended;
renewing what is wasting away; cutting away what is superfluous;
preserving what is necessary; restoring what has been lost; curing what
is corrupted! Who will now raise himself up against the Son of God? Who
can despair of his salvation, for whom the Son of God has willed to
become so lowly? Who can believe that happiness is to be found in those
things which the Son of God has taught us to despise? What tribulation
can overcome him who believes that in the Son of God human nature was
preserved intact amid violent persecution? Who can imagine himself shut
out from the kingdom of heaven when he knows that publicans and
prostitutes have imitated the Son of God? What wickedness can be found
in him who makes that Man's deed and words the object of his
contemplation, love, and striving, in whom the Son of God revealed
Himself to us as pattern of life?
--St. Augustine, On Christian Combat, via James Son of Thunder Lee.
Insignificant man, escape from your everyday business for a short while,
hide for a moment from your restless thoughts. Break off from your cares
and troubles and be less concerned about your tasks and labors. Make a
little time for God and rest a while in Him. Enter your mind's inner
chamber. Shut out everything but God and whatever helps you to seek Him,
and when you have shut the door, look for Him. Speak now to God, and say
with your whole heart: I seek your face; your face, Lord, I desire...
Look upon us, Lord, hear us and enlighten us, show us your very self.
Take pity on our efforts and our striving toward you, for we have no
strength apart from you.
Teach me to seek you, and when I seek you show yourself to me, for I
cannot seek you unless you teach me, nor can I find you unless you show
yourself to me. Let me seek you in desiring you and desire you in
seeking you, find you in loving you and love you in finding you.
--St. Anselm, via James Son of Thunder Lee.
...It is now fashionable to say in satirical spirit that such wars did
not so much break out as go on indefinitely between the city-states of
medieval Italy. It will be enough to say here that if one of these
medieval wars had really gone on without stopping for a century, it might
possibly have come within a remote distance of killing as many people as
we kill in a year in one of our great modern scientific wars between our
great modern industrial empires. But the citizens of the medieval
republic were certainly under the limitation of only being asked to die
for the things with which they had always lived, the houses they
inhabited, the shrines they venerated and the rulers and representatives
they knew; and had not the larger vision calling them to die for the
latest rumors about remote colonies as reported in anonymous newspapers.
And if we infer from our own experience that war paralysed civilisation,
we must at least admit that these warring towns turned out a number of
paralytics who go by the names of Dante and Michael Angelo, Aristio and
Titian, Leonardo and Columbus, not to mention Catherine of Siena and the
subject of this story. While we lament all this local patriotism as a
hubbub of the Dark Ages, it must seem a rather curious fact that about
three quarters of the greatest men who ever lived came out of these
little towns and were often engaged in these little wars. It remains to
be seen what will ultimately come out of our large towns; but there has
been no sign of anything of this sort since they became large; and I have
sometimes been haunted by a fancy of my youth, that these things will not
come till there is a city wall round Clapham and the tocsin is rung at
night to arm the citizens of Wimbledon.
--G. K. Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi.
Where does the strength of this community of the Church lie? Everyone
who wants to understand the strength of this community must understand
the strength of love. For love is a power that nobody can resist...In
this regard love is like death. When death comes, nobody is able to
resist it. With however many operations and remedies one fights against
death, a mortal human being cannot escape its power. Likewise the world
can do nothing against the power of love...And just as death has all
power to snatch us away from life, so love has all power to keep us alive.
--St Augustine, En. Ps. 47.13, via James Son of Thunder Lee.
The matter is quite simple. The bible is very easy to understand. But
we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable
to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand,
we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament
and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My
God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would
I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian
scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention
to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be
good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless
scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into
the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with
the New Testament.
--Soren Kierkegaard, trans. Charles F. Moore, via Shane Claiborne.
I heard that Ghandi, when people asked him if he was a Christian, would
often reply, "Ask the poor. They will tell you who the Christians are."
--Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution.
Pearls do not lie on the seashore. If you desire one, you must dive for it.
--Oriental proverb, via Kaitlyn Curtin.
Endeavor to be inclined always:
not to the easiest, but to the most difficult;
not to the most delightful, but to the most distasteful;
not to the most gratifying, but to the least pleasant;
not to what means rest for you, but to hard work;
not to the consoling, but to the unconsoling;
not to the most, but to the least;
not to the highest and most precious, but to the lowest and most despised;
not to wanting something, but to wanting nothing.
Do not go about looking for the best of temporal things, but for the worst,
and, for Christ, desire to enter into complete nakedness, emptiness, and
poverty in everything in the world.
--St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mt. Carmel.
Life holds only one tragedy, ultimately: not to have been a saint.
--Charles Peguy, via Rick Becker.
Bach's music is not merely agreeable, like other composers', but [it]
transports us to the regions of the ideal. It does not arrest our
attention momentarily but grips us the stronger and oftener we listen to
it so that, after a thousand hearings, its treasures are still unexhausted
and yield fresh beauties to excite our wonder.
--Forkel, via Hannah Mowrey.
During the first period of a man's life the greatest danger is not to take the risk.
--Keirkegaard, from "brainyquote.com".
God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he
does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.
--ibid.
I see it; there are two possible situations - one can either
do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it,
or do not do it - you will regret both.
--ibid.
It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.
--ibid.
Marriage brings one into fatal connection with custom and tradition, and
traditions and customs are like the wind and weather, altogether
incalculable.
--ibid.
Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
--ibid.
Once you label me you negate me.
--ibid.
Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
--ibid.
People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new
stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into
an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen
something.
--ibid.
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of
thought which they seldom use.
--ibid.
Purity of heart is to will one thing.
--ibid.
Take away paradox from the thinker and you have a professor.
--ibid.
The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.
--ibid.
To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.
--ibid.
[God, keep me from being counted with those who] consider themselves and
their lives as a series of sensations to be experienced rather than as a
work to be accomplished.
--John Paul II, Centesimus Annus.
Quote of the Day on 9/3/08:
"God's getting me ready for something bigger. And dangerous."
--Noah, 20, a member of the 14-strong Crisler family which attempts to
follow the rule of St. Benedict in family life, after descending upon the Worker for dinner one day.
Quote of the Day on 9/4/08 (The major portion of a conversation between me and Bill Romeo, aged 83, a new acquaintance at a nursing home):
Me: "So, what have you learned after all these years?"
Bill: "You learn how to keep your mouth shut."
Me: "Anything else?"
Bill: "No."
Quote of the Day on 9/11/08:
"Unemployment's not so bad, except when you get real hungry."
--The Monsignor.
Be not vain, my soul, and take care that the ear of your heart be not deafened by the din of your vanity. You too must listen to the selfsame Word who calls you back, and there find a place of imperturbable quiet, where love is never forsaken unless it chooses to forsake. Fix your dwelling there, my soul...Entrust to Truth whatever of truth is in you, and you will lose nothing; your rotten flesh will flower anew, all your diseases will be healed, and all these perishable things will be restored and bound fast to you; they will stand firm with you and abide, binding you to the ever-stable, abiding God.
--St. Augustine, Confessions IV.11.16, via Jim Lee.
We must love God for God's sake...This love is pleasing because it is free. It is chaste because it does not consist of spoken words but of deed and truth. It is just because it renders what is received. Whoever loves this way, loves the way he is loved, seeking in turn not what is his but what belongs to Christ, the same way Christ sought not what was his, but what was ours, or rather, ourselves.
--St Bernard of Clairvaux, via James K. H. Lee.
And there will be much work to do. But I have faith in you, and that is why I am sending you. With you is Christ. Cherish him and he will cherish you. You will behold great woe and in that woe you will be happy. Here is my behest to you: in woe seek happiness. Work, work untiringly.
--Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
It was revealed to Abba Anthony in the desert that in the city there was one who was his equal, a physician by profession, who gave his surplus to the poor and who every day sang the Trisagion with the angels.
--The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, via a Dominican friar at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C..
From an email from my Dad to his sister who is a middle school science teacher:
Your comments about your students make me anxious for our country in general and our social security in particular. How are these future pillars of our economy going to support us with the tiny pea brains and the evanescent attention span to which you uncomfortably often allude? Our generation has managed to live beyond our collective abilities for decades because credulous foreigners have been willing to send us goods in return for an uncountable number of dollars (they send us stuff, we send them paper) but that game is almost up. Our children will actually have to earn their way without this gimmick and you, who are on the ramparts of our educational establishment look into the eyes of our future economic star troopers and see....space, where no man has gone before.
Very scary.
Well, may the Lord protect us from all anxiety while we wait in joyful anticipation of the coming of our Lord, Jesus Christ. (Love that line, every time I hear it).
--Gregory B. Arnold.
The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes more time.
--U.S. Army Corps of Engineers motto, via David Nordin.
...Jesus was exhausted most of the time.
--Mike Wacker, via David Nordin.
Most people don't understand the 5,000. The 5,000 is a sprint. It's running the fastest 400 of your life, then doing it eleven more times.
--Haile Gebrselassie in an interview after breaking the world record by an unprecedented 12 seconds, via David Nordin.
Pray not for tasks equal to your powers. Pray rather for powers equal to your tasks. For then the doing of your work shall not be the miracle, but you shall be the miracle….
--Fr. Solanus Casey, via David Nordin.
A vision without a task is a dream.
A task without a vision is drudgery.
A vision and a task are the hope of the world.
--Unknown, via David Nordin.
Act not how you feel, act how you wish you felt.
--Unknown, via David Nordin.
If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world ablaze.
--St. Catherine of Sienna, via David Nordin.
Where courage is not, no other virtue can exist except by accident.
--Samuel Johnson, via David Nordin.
The vocation doesn't promise happiness, yet, once heard, there is no happiness apart from the call.
--C. S. Lewis, via David Nordin.
Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given than masturbation has to do with marriage.
--C. S. Lewis, via David Nordin.
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
--1 John 4:8, via David Nordin.
We didn’t know what love was till he came.
--Rich Mullins reflecting on John 13-17 (esp. 15:12), via David Nordin.
For the good, once it is understood as such, enkindles love; and in accord with more goodness comes greater love.
--Dante, Paradiso XXVI.28-30, via David Nordin.
Man desires love more than he desires freedom. Freedom is the means, love is the end.
--John Paul II, via David Nordin.
I feel ambivalent about selling my services in a world where some can’t buy them.
--Paul Farmer, via David Nordin.
O Salutaris Hostia
Quae caeli pandis ostium
Bella premunt hostilia,
Da robur, fer auxilium.
Amen.
O redeeming Sacrifice
which opens the gate of heaven:
enemies threaten wars;
give us strength, send aid.
Amen.
--The 10/1/11 Mass pamphlet at The Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Mary.
Error often is to be preferred to indecision.
--Aaron Burr.
In the future you might keep in mind the first rule of holes: “When you find yourself in one, stop digging.”
--David Halperin.
If you love the vision you have for community, you will destroy community. [But] if you love the people around you, you will create community.
--Deitrich Bonhoeffer, via Matthew Flynn.
If what you wish is merely to make a great splash, to be impressive and formidable, to influence other peoples of Europe, you have before you their example: get busy and imitate it. Cultivate the sciences, the arts, commerce, industry; have regular troops, fortified places, academies, and, above all, a fine financial system, which will make money circulate smoothly and so multiply and greatly enrich you. Strive to make money absolutely necessary so as to keep your people highly dependent - which calls also for fomenting material luxury and the luxury of the spirit that is inseparable from it. Do all this, and you will end up with a people as scheming, violent, greedy, ambitious, servile, and knavish as the next, and all of it at one extreme or other of misery and opulence, of license and slavery, with nothing in between....
But if perchance you wish to be a free nation, a peaceful nation, a wise nation, a nation that fears nobody and needs nobody, a nation that is sufficient unto itself and happy, then you must use another method altogether, namely this: keep alive - or bring back to life - simple customs, wholesome tastes, and a spirit that is martial but not ambitious. Instill courage and unselfishness in the hearts of your people. Employ the masses of your population in agriculture and the arts necessary for life. Cause money to become an object of contempt and, if possible, useless besides....
--Jean Jacques Rousseau, "Considerations on the Government of Poland," via Patrick Deneen.
"We have taken a wrong turning and come to a wrong place," said Father Brown, looking out of the window at the grey-green sedges and the silver flood. "Never mind; one can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place."
--G. K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Fr. Brown.
On Presbyterianism:
"Look at that blacksmith, for instance," went on Father Brown calmly; "a good man, but not a Christian–hard, imperious, unforgiving. Well, his Scotch religion was made up by men who prayed on hills and high crags, and learnt to look down on the world more than to look up at heaven. Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak."
--G. K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Fr. Brown.
I'm more excited than Jessie Spano on caffeine pills.
--Anonymous.
God... God... Dear Father in Heaven, I'm not a praying man, but if you're up there and you can hear me, show me the way. I'm at the end of my rope. Show me the way, God.
--George Bailey, via Rick Becker.
If we do only what is required of us we are slaves. The moment we do more we are free.
--Cicero, from Study is Hard Work by William Armstrong.
Now to learn to think while being taught presupposes the other difficult art of paying attention. Nothing is more rare: listening seems to be the hardest thing in the world and misunderstanding the easiest, for we tend to hear what we think we are going to hear, and too often we make it so. In a lifetime one is lucky to meet six or seven people who know how to attend: the rest, some of whom believe themselves well-bred and highly educated, have for the most part fidgety ears; their span of attention is as short as the mating of a fly. They seem afraid to lend their mind to another's thought, as if it would come back to them bruised and bent. This fear is of course fatal to sociability, and Lord Chesterfield was right when he wrote his son that the power of attention was the mark of a civilized man. The baby cannot attend, the savage and the boor will not. It is the boorishness of inattention that makes pleasant discussion turn into stupid repetitive argument, and that doubles the errors and mishaps of daily life.
--Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America, from Study is Hard Work by William Armstrong.
When we speak of the reform of institutions, the State comes chiefly to mind, not as if universal well-being were to be expected from its activity, but because things have come to such a pass through the evil of what we have termed "individualism" that, following upon the overthrow and near extinction of that rich social life which was once highly developed through associations of various kinds, there remain virtually only individuals and the State. This is to the great harm of the State itself; for, with a structure of social governance lost, and with the taking over of all the burdens which the wrecked associations once bore, the State has been overwhelmed and crushed by almost infinite tasks and duties.
--Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the "rat race"--the constant, gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
--David Foster Wallace, via Greer Hannan.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
--Robert A. Heinlein, via Member 201009 on www.studentdoctor.net.
Alyosha's Speech at the Stone
--Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.
Otium sine litteris mors est.
--Seneca.
Bathroom Wall Quotes
--Greer Hannan.
After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.
--Wallace Stevens, via Louis Dupre.
Better a little with fear of the Lord//than a great fortune with anxiety. Better a dish of herbs where love is//than a fatted ox and hatred with it.
--Proverbs 15:9.
We may not look at our pleasures to go to heaven in featherbeds; it is not the way, for our Lord Himself went thither with great pain, and by many tribulations, which was the path wherein He walked thither, and the servant may not look to be in better case than his Master.
--Thomas More to his children, via his son-in-law William Roper, via Rick Becker.
Journalism is a false picture of the world, thrown upon a lighted screen in a darkened room so that the real world is unseen and the unreal world is seen.
--G. K. Chesterton.
The essence of a republic is devotion to the common good. The essence of empire is power, the power not of the people, but of one faction over another. Just as the republic needs virtue in order to function, the empire runs on lust. Empire is politically organized appetite. Each faction strives to use the power of the state to gratify its own desires. As politicians succumb one by one to the lure of money to ensure their election and re-election, the order of the state becomes determined by those who pay the highest price for it. Those with the most money control appetite. So to insure that they stay in power, they promote unfettered appetite, feeling that the ultimate outcome of what are essentially financial transactions will be in their favor.
Wilhelm Reich felt that only socialism could lead to sexual freedom, and that unfettered sexual freedom would lead to socialism. It turns out that he was wrong. Capitalism was much better at exploiting sexual appetite, and the political system it created is much better at turning unfettered appetite into a form of political control via economic exploitation. In the 1990s, unfettered appetite meant charging a price for what used to be free. It meant the reduction of all aspects of life, including the most intimate and sacred, to a form of consumerism. It meant promoting bondage, both spiritual and economic, in the name of freedom. Ultimately, the followers of the Enlightenment believed what Augustine said when he claimed in the City of God that a man had as many masters as he had vices, but not in the way that Augustine said it. The Enlightenment simply reversed the values while espousing essentially the same concept. The Enlightenment promoted vice among its victims as a way of becoming both their economic and political masters. Plato was right; freedom of this sort did lead to slavery. Sexual liberation was a form of political control.
--E. Michael Jones.
The family is the human race's natural defense against utopianism.
--Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.
How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.
--Annie Dillard
...Nietzsche is the moral philosopher of the present age. ...Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises.
--Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue.
Music must strike fire out of the mind of man.
--Ludwig van Beethoven, via newadvent.org .
The important thing is not to think much but to love much.
--Teresa of Avila, via Anne Hainley.
Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.
--St. Augustine.
I believe that every one of us here tonight has as clear and vital a vocation as anyone in a religious order. We have the vocation of keeping alive Mr. Melcher's excitement in leading young people into an expanding imagination. Because of the very nature of the world as it is today, our children receive in school a heavy load of scientific and analytic subjects, so it is in their reading for fun, for pleasure, that they must be guided into creativity. These are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying, dissipating universe that we can help our children avoid by providing them with 'explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly.'
--Madeleine L'Engle, Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech, August, 1963, via Kevin Haley.
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. None the less certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct [one characterized by moral incoherence and unsettlable moral disputes in the modern world], we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another--doubtless very different--St. Benedict.
--Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue.
If voting could change anything, they'd make it illegal.
--Emma Goldman, via Phil Berrigan, via B. Wylie-Kellerman.
There is a religious communion claiming a divine commission, and holding all other religious bodies around it heretical or infidel; it is a well-organized, well-disciplined body; it is a sort of secret society, binding together its members by influences and by engagements which it is difficult for strangers to ascertain. It is spread over the known world; it may be weak or insignificant locally, but it is strong on the whole from its continuity; it may be smaller than all other religious bodies together, but is larger than each separately. It is a natural enemy to governments external to itself; it is intolerant and engrossing, and tends to a new modelling of society; it breaks laws, it divides families. It is a gross superstition; it is charged with the foulest crimes; it is despised by the intellect of the day; it is frightful to the imagination of the many. And there is but one communion such.
--John Henry Cardinal Newman, via N. Ogle.
Man has always lost his way; but now he has lost his address.
--G. K. Chesterton.
Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing. And every word, when once it is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak; when ill-treated or unjustly reviled it always needs its father to help it; for it has no power to protect or help itself.
--Plato, The Phaedrus.
...it would be good for us to ask ourselves as well: Am I really my brother's keeper? Yes, you are your brother's keeper! To be human means to care for one another! But when harmony is broken, a metamorphosis occurs: the brother who is to be cared for and loved becomes an adversary to fight, to kill. What violence occurs at that moment, how many conflicts, how many wars have marked our history! We need only look at the suffering of so many brothers and sisters. This is not a question of coincidence, but the truth: we bring about the rebirth of Cain in every act of violence and in every war. All of us! And even today we continue this history of conflict between brothers, even today we raise our hands against our brother. Even today, we let ourselves be guided by idols, by selfishness, by our own interests, and this attitude persists. We have perfected our weapons, our conscience has fallen asleep, and we have sharpened our ideas to justify ourselves. As if it were normal, we continue to sow destruction, pain, death! Violence and war lead only to death, they speak of death! Violence and war are the language of death!...Look upon your brother's sorrow--I think of the children, look upon these - look upon your brother's sorrow, and do not add to it, stay your hand, rebuild the harmony that has been shattered; and all this not by conflict but by encounter! May the noise of weapons cease! War always marks the failure of peace, it is always a defeat for humanity. Let the words of Pope Paul VI resound again: 'No more one against the other, no more, never! ... war never again, never again war!'. 'Peace expresses itself only in peace, a peace which is not separate from the demands of justice but which is fostered by personal sacrifice, clemency, mercy and love'. Forgiveness, dialogue, reconciliation – these are the words of peace, in beloved Syria, in the Middle East, in all the world! Let us pray for reconciliation and peace, let us work for reconciliation and peace, and let us all become, in every place, men and women of reconciliation and peace! Amen.
--Pope Francis on 9/7/13.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
--Wendell Berry, The Real Work.
I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
--C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, via R. McGann.
How far one's vocation will take one, is always a mystery, and where one's vocation will take one. But I believe it to be true always that the foundations are always in poverty, manual labor, and in seeming failure. It is the pattern of the Cross, and in the Cross is joy of Spirit.
--Dorothy Day.
Turn to the Lord with your whole heart and leave behind this wretched world. Then your soul shall find rest. For the kingdom of God is the peace and joy of the Holy Spirit. If you prepare within your heart a fitting dwelling place, Christ will come to you and console you.
His glory and beauty are within you, and he delights in dwelling there. The Lord frequently visits the heart of man. There he shares with man pleasant conversations; welcome consolation, abundant peace and a wonderful intimacy.
So come, faithful soul. Prepare your heart for your spouse to dwell within you. For he says: If anyone loves me, he will keep my word and we shall come to him and make our dwelling within him.
Make room for Christ. When you possess Christ you are a rich man, for he is sufficient for you. He himself, shall provide for you and faithfully administer all your cares. You will not have to place your hope in men. Put all your trust in God; let him be both your fear and your love. He will respond on your behalf and will do whatever is in your best interest.
You have here no lasting city. For wherever you find yourself, you will always be a pilgrim from another city. Until you are united intimately with Christ, you will never find your true rest.
Let your thoughts be with the Most High and direct your prayers continually to Christ. If you do not know how to contemplate the glory of heaven, take comfort in the passion of Christ, and dwell willingly in his sacred wounds. Endure with Christ, suffer for him, if you wish to reign with him.
Once you have entered completely into the depths of Jesus, and have a taste of his powerful love, then you will not care about your own convenience or inconvenience. Rather you will rejoice all the more in insults and injuries, for the love of Jesus makes a man scorn his own needs.
--The Imitation of Christ.
If I did not believe, if I did not make what is called an act of faith (and each act of faith increases our capacity for faith), if I did not have faith that the works of mercy do lighten the sum total of suffering in the world, so that those who are suffering in this ghastly struggle somehow mysteriously find their pain lifted and some balm of consolation poured on their wounds — if I did not believe these things, the problem of evil would indeed be overwhelming.
--Dorothy Day, via B. Wilson.
Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.
--Victor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning.
When Jesus comes back he's gonna be all like "You guys suck!" and "Whammo!" and "in your face, sinners!" and we'll all be like "no way it's Jesus" and he's all like "Way" and we're all like "No. WAY!" and he's all like "Dudes, stop sucking so much" and we'll all be like "forgive us bro" and he's all like NINJA KICK and we're all like "noooooo" and Jesus is all like laser beams and awesome swords and nunchuks and kicking everybody all the way to Hades and we're all like oh man this suuuuucks and then we sober up.
--From a CNN blog post, via S. McCarthy.
Of the things which wisdom provides for the blessedness of one's whole life, by far the greatest is the possession of friendship.
--Epicurus, The Principal Doctrines, XXVII.
Finally, it is generally agreed that no activity can be properly undertaken by a man who is busy with many things—not eloquence, and not the liberal arts—since the mind, stretched in different directions, takes in nothing at any depth but spits out everything that has been, so to speak, crammed into it. Nothing concerns the busy man less than the business of living; nothing is so difficult to learn. In the case of other arts there are many men to be found everywhere who can teach them, indeed certain arts we have seen absorbed so thoroughly by boys that they could even give instruction themselves; one must spend an entire lifetime in learning how to live, and, which may surprise you more, an entire lifetime in learning how to die. So many great men, having dispensed with all hindrances and renounced wealth, business commitments, and pleasures, have concentrated on this one aim up to the very end of their lives, to know how to live; the majority of these, however, depart from life admitting that the knowledge has still eluded them, and how much more this is true of those others.
--Seneca, On the Shortness of Life.
If it is true—as we believe it is—that Christ is really present in the Eucharist, then this is the event that is at the center of absolutely everything. It is the event, not just of a single day, but of the history of the world as a whole, as the decisive force that then becomes the force from which changes can come…. If we want the world to move forward a little, the only criteria in terms of which this can happen is God, who enters into our lives as a real presence. The Eucharist is the place where men can receive the kind of formation from which new things come into being.
--Pope Benedict XVI.
"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."
"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of. ..."
--C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, via Gil Meilaender.
Don't aspire to be like the gilded weather vane on top of a great building. However much it may glitter, however high it may be, it adds nothing to the firmness of the structure.
Rather be like an old stone block hidden in the foundations, under the ground where no one can see you. Because of you, the house will not fall.
--St. Josemaria Escriva, The Way, #590.
Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.
--Léon Bloy, from the Epigram to Graham Greene's The End of the Affair.
The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences. Nevertheless, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action.
This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide for enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality. Mass leisure, mass culture, and even high culture when only attended to passively and for extrinsic reasons—such as the wish to flaunt one’s status—are parasites of the mind. They absorb psychic energy without providing substantive strength in return. They leave us more exhausted, more disheartened than we were before.
Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing. Most jobs and many leisure activities—especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media—are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving only feeble husks. But like everything else, work and leisure can be appropriated for our needs. People who learn to enjoy their work, who do not waste their free time, end up feeling that their lives as a whole have become much more worthwhile. “The future,” wrote C. K. Brightbill, “will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.
--Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow.
In light of heaven, the worst suffering on earth will be seen to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.
--Teresa of Avila.
If I ever get put on trial for being a Christian, I want there to be a lot of evidence against me, that I'm guilty.
--A dude named Tom who sat down next to me after Mass one day and started praying with me, upon my asking him why he wore a prominent cross around his neck.
The family is one of those places that is a lot bigger on the inside than it appears from the outside.
--C. Scrafford.
A stick, we are agreed, is some thing to have in the hand when walking. But there are times when we sit down; and if our journey shall have taken us to the beach, our stick must at once be propped in the sand while from a suitable distance we throw stones at it. However beautiful the sea, its beauty can only be appreciated properly in this fashion. Scenery must not be taken at a gulp; we must absorb it unconsciously. With the mind gently exercised as to whether we scored a two on the band or a one just below it, and with the muscles of the arm at stretch, we are in a state ideally receptive of beauty.
--A. A. Milne, "The Friend of Man."
If I am still not able to remain at peace when faced with difficult situations, then it is better that I should begin to strive to keep this peace in the easier situations of everyday life: to quietly and without irritability do my daily chores, to commit myself to doing each thing well in the present moment without preoccupying myself with what follows, to speak peacefully and with gentleness to those around me, to avoid excessive hurry in my gestures and in the way I climb the stairs! The first steps of the ladder of sanctity could very well be those of my own apartment! The soul is often reeducated by the body! Small things done with love and to please God are extremely beneficial in making us grow; it's one of the secrets of holiness of St. Therese of Lisieux. And if we persevere in such a way, in prayer and with these small acts of collaboration with grace, we will be able to live the words of Saint Paul: "Don't be anxious; instead, give thanks in all your prayers and petitions and make your requests known to God. And God's peace which is beyond all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus" (Phil 4:6-7). And this peace nobody can take from us.
--Jacques Phillipe, via C. Scrafford.
On the sands I romped with children
Do you blame me that I did not improve myself
By bottling anemones?
But I say that these children will be men and women
And I say that the anemones will not be men and women
(Not just yet, at least, let us say).
And I say that the greatest men of the world might romp with children
And that I should like to see Shakespeare romping with children
And Browning and Darwin romping with children
And Mr. Gladstone romping with children
And Professor Huxley romping with children
And all the Bishops romping with children
And I say that if a man had climbed to the stars
And found the secrets of the angels,
The best thing and the most useful thing he could do
Would be to come back and romp with children.
--G. K. Chesterton, North Berwick, via C. Scrafford.
Jesus is a hidden treasure, an inestimable good, which few souls can find for it is hidden and the world loves what sparkles.
--St. Therese of Lisieux, via C. Scrafford.
Women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action.
--Joseph Conrad, via Christy Wampole.
It is better to remain silent and to be than to talk and not be.
--St. Ignatius of Antioch.
There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.
--Chesterton.
I am done with great things and big plans, great institutions and big success. I am for those tiny, invisible, loving, human forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, which, if given time, will rend the hardest monuments of human pride.
--William James, via Dorothy Day.
The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.
--Chesterton.
Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.
--Chesterton.
If you want to be a good doctor, score above 250 on Step 1. If you want to be a great doctor, then write three thank you letters every week.
--R. Gunderman, MD.
Only by praying together with their children can a father and mother--exercising their royal priesthood--penetrate the innermost depths of their children’s hearts and leave an impression that the future events in their lives will not be able to efface.
--Pope Saint John Paul II the Great.
Really I think it might do you a lot of good and give you a certain happiness to say the Rosary every day. If you don’t like it, so much the better, because then you would deliver yourself from the servitude of doing things for your own satisfaction.
--Thomas Merton, via Rick Becker.
An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. ...We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.
--C. S. Lewis.
To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts unexpressed--that can make of this earth a garden.
--Goethe.
Nature seems to be the spatial and temporal, as distinct from what is less fully so or not so at all. She seems to
be the world of quantity, as against the world of quality; of objects as against consciousness; of the bound, as against the wholly or partially autonomous; of that which knows no values as against that which both has and perceives value; of efficient causes (or, in some modern systems, of no causality at all) as against final causes. Now I take it that when we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own convenience, we
reduce it to the level of ‘Nature’ in the sense that we suspend our judgements of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it in terms of quantity. This repression of elements in what would otherwise be our total reaction to it is sometimes very noticeable and even painful: something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room. These objects resist the movement of the mind whereby we thrust
them into the world of mere Nature. But in other instances too, a similar price is exacted for our analytical knowledge and manipulative power, even if we have ceased to count it. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be faroff echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from what we expected, and the old opposition to Galileo or to ‘body-snatchers’ is simply obscurantism. But that is not the whole story. It is not the
greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.
--C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.
Dear Jesus, help us to spread Your fragrance everywhere we go.
Flood our souls with Your Spirit and Life.
Penetrate and possess our whole being so utterly
that our lives may only be a radiance of Yours.
Shine through us and be so in us
that every soul we come in contact with may feel Your presence in our souls.
Let them look up, and see no longer us, but only Jesus!
Stay with us and then we shall begin to shine as You shine,
so to shine as to be a light to others.
The light, O Jesus, will be all from You; none of it will be ours.
It will be You, shining on others through us.
Let us thus praise You in the way You love best, by shining on those around us.
Let us preach You without preaching, not by words but by example,
by the catching force, the sympathetic influence of what we do,
the evident fullness of the love our hearts bear for You. Amen.
--John Henry Cardinal Newman.
There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise.
--St. Augustine, The City of God.
So often today, man does not know that which is in him, in the depths of his mind and heart. So often he is uncertain about the meaning of his life on this earth. He is assailed by doubt, a doubt which turns into despair. We ask you, therefore, we beg you with humility and with trust, let Christ speak to man. He alone has words of life, yes, of life eternal.
--Pope Saint John Paul II the Great, Inaugural Sermon.
At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems. He wanted "a place for everything and everything in the right place." Distinction, definition,
tabulation were his delight. Though full of turbulent activities, he was equally full of the impulse to formalise
them. War was (in intention) formalised by the art of heraldry and the rules of chivalry; sexual passion (in
intention), by an elaborate code of love. Highly original and soaring philosophical speculation squeezes itself into a rigid dialectical pattern copied from Aristotle. Studies like Law and Moral Theology, which demand the
ordering of very diverse particulars, especially flourish. Every way in which a poet can write (including some in
which he had much better not) is classified in the Arts of Rhetoric. There was nothing which medieval people
liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modem inventions I suspect that they would
most have admired the card index. This impulse is equally at work in what seem to us their silliest pedantries and in their most sublime achievements. In the latter we see the tranquil, indefatigable, exultant energy of passionately systematic minds bringing huge masses of heterogeneous material into unity. The perfect examples are the Summa of Aquinas and Dante's Divine Comedy; as unified and ordered as the Parthenon or the Oedipus Rex, as crowded and varied as a London terminus on a bank holiday.
--C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image.
...those who dislike ritual in general--ritual in any and every department of life--may be asked most earnestly to reconsider the question. It is a pattern imposed on the mere flux of our feelings by reason and will, which renders pleasures less fugitive and griefs more endurable, which hands over to the power of wise custom the task (to which the individual and his moods are so inadequate) of being festive or sober, gay or reverent, when we choose to be, and not at the bidding of chance.
--C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost.
Arseny's hands quickly remembered their forgotten work and now they treated the pestilent sores on their own. As he watched the deft motions of his own hands, Arseny began to fear their actions would become routine and frighten off the astonishing power that flowed through them into the patients but had no direct relation to the art of medicine. Arseny noticed ever more frequently when he was healing people that their recoveries came from that power, not from the ground sulfur and egg yolk. The sulfur and egg yolk did not harm but (or so it now seemed to Arseny) they did not substantially help. It was Arseny's inner work that was important: his ability to concentrate on prayer while simultaneously dissolving himself within the patient. And if the patient recovered, it was Arseny's recovery.
--Eugene Vodolazkin, Laurus.
...It is the return of the Thomist Philosophy; which is the philosophy of commonsense, as compared with the paradoxes of Kant and Hegel and the Pragmatists. The Roman religion will be, in the exact sense, the only Rationalistic religion. The other religions will not be Rationalist but Relativist; declaring that the reason is itself relative and unreliable; declaring that Being is only Becoming or that all time is only a time of transition; saying in mathematics that two and two make five in the fixed stars, saying in metaphysics and in morals that there is a good beyond good and evil. Instead of the materialist who said that the soul did not exist, we shall have the new mystic who says that the body does not exist. Amid all these things the return of the Scholastic will simply be the return of the sane man.
...But to say that there is no pain, or no matter, or no evil, or no difference between man and beast, or indeed between anything and anything else--this is a desperate effort to destroy all experience and sense of reality; and men will weary of it more and more, when it has ceased to be the latest fashion; and will look once more for something that will give form to such a chaos and keep the proportions of the mind of man. Millions of men are already at least wondering whether this solution is not to be found in the Catholic order and philosophy.
--G. K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shallows.
The most experienced psychologist or observer of human nature knows infinitely less of the human heart than the simplest Christian who lives beneath the Cross of Jesus.
The greatest psychological insight, ability, and experience cannot grasp this one thing: what sin is.
Worldly wisdom knows what distress and weakness and failure are, but it does not know the godlessness of man. And so it does not know that man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness. Only the Christian knows this.
In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner.
The psychiatrist must first search my heart and yet he never plumbs its ultimate depth. The Christian brother knows when I come to him: here is a sinner like myself, a godless man who wants to confess and yearns for God's forgiveness.
The psychiatrist views me as if there were no God. The brother views me as I am before the judging and merciful God in the Cross of Jesus Christ.
--Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together.
The "scientific" position frequently consists of denying the existence of whatever does not belong to current scientific method.
--Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society.
We see individual things as instances, get behind them, relate them to other individual things, and post a representative sign for them that points to what is similar in them. This sign is a form. I add that it is only a form, an abstract form, not a living form such as we have in the leaf of a plant, in an animal, or in the performing of an intellectual act. The latter forms are full of life; they are modes of unique and concrete reality. But the representative sign is a mere form, a concept, a mathamatical formula, a device. It does not fit any individual case fully. It presents only certain features, as many as are needed to show what is meant, still leaving our gaze and our hands free for other things that are similar but not the same. It is possible in this way to achieve a comprehensive survey of all these things and hence to lay hold of them and master them.
The cost of this mastery, however, is vitality. We are now no longer in the first living relation to corporeal things and people; the relation has been attenuated. We are in an abstract and artificial world, a substitute world, an improper world of significant signs. These signs no longer relate to this specific thing but to all things of this type. Universal signs, then, abstractions. We now live only in the abstract.
...What the concept is for knowledge of things, mechanisms, instruments, and machines are for practical action. What concepts do for knowledge--i.e., grasp many things, not in their vitality, but only by means of posited signs that rightly indicate common features--machines do for action. Machines are steel concepts. They lay hold of many things in such a way as to disregard their individual features and to treat them as though they were all the same. Mechanical processes have the same character as conceptual thinking. Both control things by taking them out of a special living relation to what is individual and creating an artificial order into which they all, more or less, fit.
In other words, all culture has from the very first this abstract aspect. Yet when modern thinking in mathematical concepts arrived and modern technology came into the world of action, this aspect became predominant. It became normative in our relation to the world, our conduct, and therefore our being.
--Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como.
Still, let us probe deeper. Plants can grow only when their roots are in the dark. They emerge from the dark into the light. That is the direction of life. The plant and its direction die when the root is exposed to light. All life must be grounded in what is not conscious and from that root emerge into the brightness of consciousness. Yet I see consciousness more and more deeply the root of our life. A relation to other lives is seen, one event is brought under the same law as others, and we get closer and closer in our scrutiny to the beginnings, the origins of life. The root of life itself, what is innermost to it, is lit up.
Can life sustain this? Can it become consciousness and at the same time remain alive?
--Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como.
People need not only to obtain things, they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others. Prisoners in rich countries often have access to more things and services than members of their families, but they have no say in how things are to be made and cannot decide what to do with them. Their punishment consists in being deprived of what I shall call "conviviality." They are degraded to the status of mere consumers.
I choose the term "conviviality" to designate the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment; and this in contrast with the conditioned response of persons to the demands made upon them by others, and by a man-made environment. I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society's members.
--Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality.
Since the scientist must use the materials he has at hand; and since almost nothing is known about the relationship of man to the automobile, the telephone, or the radio, and absolutely nothing about the relationship of man to the Apparat or about the sociological effects of other aspects of the technique, that scientist moves unconsciously toward the spheres of what is known scientifically, and tries to limit the whole question to that.
--Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society.
I have suggested that the cultural health of Europe, including the cultural health of its component parts, is incompatible with extreme forms of both nationalism and internationalism. But the cause of that disease, which destroys the very soil in which culture has its roots, is not so much extreme ideas, and the fanaticism which they stimulate, as the relentless pressure of modern industrialism, setting the problems which the extreme ideas attempt to solve. Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.
--T. S. Eliot, quoted from Alan Jacobs, The Year of Our Lord 1943.
Imitation is often a shortcut to a solution. We copy when we lack the inclination, the ability or the time to work out an independent solution. People in a hurry will imitate more readily than people at leisure. Hustling thus tends to produce uniformity. And in the deliberate fusing of individuals into a compact group, incessant action will play a considerable role.
--Eric Hoffer, The True Believer.
Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. How can he remember well his ignorance--which his growth requires--who has so often to use his knowledge? We should feed and clothe him gratuitously sometimes, and recruit him with our cordials, before we judge of him. The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.
--Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods.
Feed him that dies of hunger; for whenever thou canst save a man by feeding him, if thou hast not fed him, thou hast slain him.
--St. Ambrose, from the Summa, 1a2ae q71 a3.
We should make few friends for the sake of pleasure, since but little sweetness suffices to season life, just as little salt suffices for our meat.
--Aristotle, Ethic ix, 10, from the Summa, 1a2ae q71 a3.