Children complicate life, but so sweetly that they should serve to give the worker fresh courage rather than to lessen his resources. The little ones take much of you, and what good would they be if they did not now and then tease and tax you? But they hearten you just as much, and perhaps [...]
Category Archives: Quotations
Eliot on Reading
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
There never was a time when the reading public was so large, or so helplessly exposed to the influence of its own time. There never was a time when those who read at all, read so many more books by living authors than books by dead authors. There never was a time so completely parochial, [...]
Devotion Before Study
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Apt words before school begins…
… study must first of all leave room for worship, prayer, direct meditation on the things of God. Study is itself a divine office, an indirect divine office; it seeks out and honors the traces of the Creator, or His images, according as it investigates nature or humanity; but it must [...]
Tradition
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes — our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.
–G.K. Chesterton
Rousseau Sums Up My Semester So Far
Friday, April 4, 2008
From the Discourse On The Origin And The Foundations Of Inequality Among Men:
For it is no light undertaking to disentangle what is original from what is artificial in man’s present Nature, and to know accurately a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never did exist, which probably never will exist, and about which it [...]
Possibly Repulsive
Friday, December 7, 2007
From A Lexicon Of The Homeric Dialect
My main hope has been, by making the reading of Homer easier, to bring him to readers who will read the epics as what above all things they are–as poems, as works of imagination. For such reading, translations being useless, an accurate and familiar knowledge of the Homeric [...]
The Imitation - Ourselves
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
The interior man puts the care of himself before all other concerns, and he who attends to himself carefully does not find it hard to hold his tongue about others. You will never be devout of heart unless you are thus silent about the affairs of others and pay particular attention to yourself. If you [...]
The Necessity of the Classics
Thursday, December 14, 2006
From The Necessity of the Classics by Louise Cowan:
Our need for the classics is intense. Yet any defense of them in our time must come from a sense of their absolute necessity not from a desire to inculcate cultural literacy, or to keep alive a pastime for an elite, but to preserve the full range [...]
Loving Humanity
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
It is easier to be enthusiastic about Humanity with a capital ‘H’ than it is to love individual men and women, especially those who are uninteresting, exasperating, depraved, or otherwise unattractive. Loving everybody in general may be an excuse for loving nobody in particular.
– C.S. Lewis
Purpose for Leisure, Art, & Contemplation
Wednesday, April 5, 2006
Music, the fine arts, poetry - anything that festively raises up human existence and thereby constitutes it true riches - all derive their life from a hidden root, and this root is a contemplation which is turned toward God and the world so as to affirm them.
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We see still another form of such activity [contemplation] [...]
