Reading the Psalms
How I cried out to you, my God, when I read the Psalms of David, those hymns of faith, those songs of a pious heart in which the spirit of pride can find no place!…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
Today’s One-Liner (#177)
“I’d rather see a sermon lived than talked.” –An old woman from North Saint Louis, quoted by John Kavanaugh, The Word Encountered: Meditations on the Sunday Scriptures, 86
Effort
A professor had a wife who never had dinner ready on time and every day he had to sit around waiting. Suddenly it occurred to him that he could utilize this time and he began…
Up to Marcel
I knew that my brain was like a mountain landscape rich in minerals, wherein lay vast and varied ores of great price. But should I have time to exploit them? For two reasons I was…
Today’s One-Liner (#176)
Friends boasted that Proust could declaim whole pages of Balzac by heart. –Josef Czapski, Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, trans. Eric Karpeles, p. 33.
Open a Book
There was nothing to do but wait it out. My kind has to become accustomed to loneliness. And when one is alone there is nothing to do but study. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, In My Father’s…
Today’s One-Liner (#175)
Cultivate the art of omission, of elimination, of simplification: that is the secret of strength. ––A.G. Sertillanges, O.P., The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, translated by Mary Ryan, 208
A Zone of Silence
Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the…
Today’s One-Liner (#174)
Whenever I was in love I always felt there was a telegraphic esprit between the person and me. –—Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations, edited by Grace Farrell, p. 206
Today’s One-Liner (#173)
In some radical circles the vehemence of one’s feelings against the hierarchy is taken as an index of genuine Christianity. –James Hitchcock, The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism, 1971