Think of all that has happened here, on this earth. All the blood hot and strong for living, pleasuring, that has soaked back into it. For grieving and suffering too, of course, but still getting something out of it for all that, getting a lot out of it, because after all you dont have to continue to bear what you believe is suffering; you can always choose to stop that, put an end to that. And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing; there is only one thing worse than not being alive, and that's shame. But you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. Look at the seed, the acorns, at what happens even to carrion when you try to bury it: it refuses too, seethes and struggles too until it reaches light and air again, hunting the sun still. ~~~ William Faulkner, The Old People
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It is, alas, only too easy for the superficial reader to float along on the unruffled surface of these statements of Thomas Aquinas, which seem transparent to the very bottom, and take no account of the depths over which their serene clarity lies. ~~~ Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues

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No one is exempt from talking nonsense; the mistake is to do it solemnly.

    ~~ Montaigne

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The central intuition which governs the whole philosophical and theological undertaking of St. Thomas is that it is impossible to do justice to God without doing justice to nature, and that doing justice to nature is, at the same time, the surest way of doing justice to God.   ~~~ Etienne Gilson

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In reading some of Goethe's sayings, so worshipped by his votaries, I came across this, "Live in the all." That is to say, your separate identity is but a wretched one, -- good; but get out of yourself, spread and expand yourself, and bring to yourself the tinglings of life that are felt in the flowers and the woods, that are felt in the planets Saturn and Venus, and the Fixed Stars. What nonsense! Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. "My dear boy," Goethe says to him, "you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the all, and then you will be happy!" As with all great genius, there is an immense deal of flummery in Goethe, and in proportion to my own contact with him, a monstrous deal of it in me.

Letter from Melville to Hawthorne

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Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden...We join a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young Nazi, 'to be free from freedom.'

   ~~~ Eric Hoffer (via Brothers Judd)

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No man believes that many-textured knowledge and skill - as a just idea of the solar system, or the power of painting flesh, or of reading written harmonies - can come late and of a sudden; yet many will not stick at believing that happiness can come at any day and hour solely by a new disposition of events; though there is nought less capable of a magical production than a mortal's happiness, which is mainly a complex of habitual relations and dispositions not to be wrought by news from foreign parts, or any whirling of fortune's wheel for one on whose brow Time has written legibly.

   ~~~ George Eliot Felix Holt, The Radical (link via Dave Trowbridge)


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What is necessary every moment is to be where we ought to be and to do the thing that matters. Everything makes one harmony in the concert of the human and the divine.

   ~~~ The Intellectual Life, A. G. Sertillanges (quote via Fool's Folly)
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Idleness, in the old sense of the word, so far from being synonymous with leisure, is more nearly the inner prerequisite which renders leisure impossible: it might be described as the utter absence of leisure, or the very opposite of leisure. Leisure is only possible when a man is at one with himself, when he acquiesces in his own being, whereas the essence of acedia [idleness] is the refusal to acquiesce in one's own being. Idleness and the incapacity for leisure correspond with one another. Leisure is the contrary of both.

   ~~~ Leisure the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper (quote via Goliard Blog)


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It is the private life that holds out the mirror to infinity; personal intercourse, and that alone, that ever hints at a personality beyond our daily vision.

   ~~~ E.M. Forster, Howard’s End
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If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why read it? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make up happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply . . . . A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

   ~~~ Franz Kafka


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The dynamic element in my philosophy, taken as a whole, can be seen as an obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction.

   ~~~ Gabriel Marcel

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Rightly understood, the problem of God is not one problem among several; it is the only problem there is.

   ~~~ Schubert Ogden #

It were certainly to be wished that some expedient were fallen upon to reconcile philosophy and common sense, which . . . have waged most cruel wars with each other.

   ~~~ Hume

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No one is exempt from talking nonsense; the mistake is to do it solemnly.

   ~~~ Montaigne
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Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness—all foes to real understanding. Likewise tolerance or broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in our little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

   ~~~ Mark Twain
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You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers.
You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions.

   ~~~ Naguib Mahfouz
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There is something so massive, stable, and almost irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank and great possessions, that their very existence seems to give them a right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in their secret minds.

   ~~~ The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Yet the truth that dwells in the core of all things none but the few do contemplate.

   ~~~ De Veritate, St. Anselm
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It’s said that when Henry James received a manuscript that he didn’t like, he would return it with the comment, “You have chosen a good subject and are treating it in a straightforward manner.” This usually pleased the person getting the manuscript back, but it was the worst thing that James could think of to say, for he knew better than anybody else, that the straightforward manner is seldom equal to the complications of the good subject.

   ~~~ Flannery O’Connor
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So many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellowmen.

   ~~~ W.E.B. Du Bois
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He missed an invaluable opportunity to hold his tongue.

   ~~~ Andrew Lang
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Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

   ~~~ Moby Dick, Herman Melville
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We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

   ~~~ “The Middle Years,” Henry James
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She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

   ~~~ Beloved, Toni Morrison
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No one who loves young people can share in the delight they seem to feel in lightening their knapsacks and throwing away the basic rations they will eventually need when the going gets rough.

   ~~~ Josef Pieper
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How frighteningly few are the persons whose death would spoil our appetite and make the world seem empty.

    ~~~ Eric Hoffer #

Interior decorating is a rock-hard science compared to psychology practiced by amateurs.

    ~~~ Anthony Scalia #

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.

    ~~~ Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain #

Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?

   ~~~ Hamlet #

It’s some that can live their whole life out without asking about it and it’s others has to know why it is.

   ~~~ The Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” Flannery O’Connor
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dilige, et quod uis fac: siue taceas, dilectione taceas; siue clames, dilectione clames; siue emendes, dilectione emendes; siue parcas, dilectione parcas: radix sit intus dilectionis, non potest de ista radice nisi bonum existere.
[Love, and do what you will. If you are silent, do it out of love. If you cry out, do it out of love. If you correct, do it out of love. If you show mercy, do it out of love. Let the root of love be within. From this root nothing can come but good.]

   ~~~In Epistolam Ioannis Ad Parthos, St. Augustine
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So, rather than appear foolish afterward, I renounce seeming clever now.

    ~~~ The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco #

Good sense is mankind's most equitably divided endowment, for everyone thinks he is so abundantly provided with it that even those with the most insatiable appetites and most difficult to please in other ways do not want more than they have of this.

   ~~~ Discourse on Method, René Descartes #

Still, living displaces false sentiments.
   ~~~ "Early Purges", Seamus Heaney #