Quotidian Quotes

2003-11-07T15:04:00.000-08:00

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. ~~ Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

2003-08-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

My cousin's husband who also teaches at Auburn came into the Church last week. He had been going to Mass with them but never showed any interest. We asked how he got interested and his answer was that the sermons were so horrible, he knew there must be something else there to make the people come.... -- from a letter by Flannery O'Connor (via Open Book)

2003-03-25T14:28:00.000-08:00

Are not lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been hints of it -- tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for. -- C. S. Lewis

2003-03-04T17:17:00.000-08:00

I'm a child of the age, a child of doubt and unbelief, and even, I'm certain, till the day they close the lid of my coffin. What terrible torment this thirst to believe has cost me and is still costing me, the stronger it becomes in my soul, the stronger are the arguments against it. And despite all this God sends me moments of great tranquility, moments during which I love and find I am loved by others. It was during such a moment that I formed within myself a symbol of faith in which all is clear and sacred for me. The symbol is very simple, and here is what it is: to believe that there is nothing more beautiful, more profound, more sympathetic, more reasonable, more courageous, and more perfect than Christ; and there not only isn't, but I tell myself with a jealous love, there cannot be. More than that -- if someone succeeded in proving to me that Christ was outside the truth, and if, indeed, the truth was outside Christ, I would sooner remain with Christ than with the truth. -- Dostoevsky

2003-01-16T23:25:00.000-08:00

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. ~~~ James Joyce, The Dead

2002-12-02T23:56:00.000-08:00

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

2002-11-26T14:51:00.000-08:00

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

2002-11-05T10:05:00.000-08:00

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

~~ Montaigne

2002-11-04T14:46:00.000-08:00

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

2002-10-30T11:37:00.000-08:00

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

2002-09-17T16:40:00.000-07:00

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)

2002-08-31T16:05:00.000-07:00

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)

2002-07-19T13:35:00.000-07:00

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)

2002-07-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

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)

2002-06-20T11:54:00.000-07:00

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

2002-06-04T10:08:00.000-07:00

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

2002-06-03T09:48:00.000-07:00

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

2002-05-30T11:42:00.000-07:00

2002-05-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

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

~~~ Schubert Ogden

2002-05-28T08:40:00.000-07:00

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

2002-05-24T09:54:00.000-07:00

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

~~~ Montaigne

2002-05-22T10:13:00.000-07:00

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

2002-05-21T12:15:00.000-07:00

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

~~~ Naguib Mahfouz

2002-05-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

2002-05-17T07:25:00.000-07:00

Yet the truth that dwells in the core of all things none but the few do contemplate.

~~~ De Veritate, St. Anselm

2002-05-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

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

2002-05-15T11:48:00.000-07:00

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

2002-05-14T00:44:00.000-07:00

He missed an invaluable opportunity to hold his tongue.

~~~ Andrew Lang

2002-05-13T08:20:00.000-07:00

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

2002-05-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

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

2002-05-09T13:37:00.000-07:00

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

2002-05-02T10:40:00.000-07:00

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

2002-05-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

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

~~~ Eric Hoffer

2002-04-30T08:04:00.000-07:00

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

~~~ Anthony Scalia

2002-04-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

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

~~~ Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain

2002-04-26T00:06:00.000-07:00

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

~~~ Hamlet

2002-04-25T09:53:00.000-07:00

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

2002-04-24T08:07:00.000-07:00

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

2002-04-23T00:10:00.000-07:00

So, rather than appear foolish afterward, I renounce seeming clever now.

~~~ The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco

2002-04-22T00:04:00.000-07:00

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

2002-04-21T10:33:00.000-07:00

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