Today’s One-Liner (#192)
The great benefit to be derived from reading pre-modern authors is to come to realize that after all, we [moderns] might have been mistaken. –C.F.J. Martin, quoted in Sohrab Ahmari, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
What Makes Man Human: An Easy Essay by Peter Maurin
1. To give and not to takethat is what makes man human. 2. To serve and not to rulethat is what makes man human. 3. To help and not to crushthat is what makes man…
Today’s One-Liner (#191)
She loved [composer Richard] Wagner, which was something very difficult to understand. –Joe Zarella on Dorothy Day, in Rosalie G. Riegle, ed., Dorothy Day: Portraits by Those Who Knew Her
Minute Particulars
His father and mother had walked where he would walk as a young man, drifter and dreamer, who would in his fiction delineate each footstep, each bird call, each oval of sand wet or dry,…
Today’s One-Liner (#190)
The Irish were born for leaving, otherwise the rest of the world would have no pubs. –Auntie Violet, in Kenneth Branagh’s film, Belfast
Stay with Christ
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous dictum that he would stay with Christ even if he were proven scientifically wrong suggests no more and no less than a belief in the primacy of moral values over theoretical knowledge….
Today’s One-Liner (#189)
Jokes could be fatal in the Soviet Union. –Gary Saul Morson, Wisdom Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter
The Talmud Jew
The Talmud Jew doesn’t kill. He doesn’t take part in wild orgies. You don’t have to fear him in the woods or on a lonely road. He doesn’t carry a gun. He doesn’t scheme to…
Today’s One-Liner (#188)
Hillel said, Separate not thyself from the congregation; trust not in thyself until the day of thy death; judge not thy fellow-man until thou art come into his place and say not anything which cannot…
Portrait of the Artist as a Kid
In his new school James excelled at lessons and won prizes for the best English compositions. The money helped to buy clothes and food for the needy family and even allowed for little trips to…