Inexplicable, and I Most of All
“And I shall also tell you, dear mother, that each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I most of all.” At that mother even smiled, she wept and smiled: “How can it…
Category: Classics
These Two
[Dale] Carnegie commanded anyone wishing to acquire truly extensive and precise diction to give over his days and nights to the Bible and Shakespeare. So I began to read these two sacred texts at bedtime. …
Today’s One-Liner (#234)
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” —William Shakespeare, The Tempest
Ecclesiastes
Compared with the neat little nostrums of comfort-mongering minds who cross our t’s and dot our i’s, Ecclesiastes is as great, as deep, and as terrifying as the ocean. If this philosopher were alive today…
Today’s One-Liner (#233)
I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. —Ecclesiastes, 1: 14
For the Young
St. Augustine’s famous Confessions is a book directed to the very heart of each young person. No other book is quite like it. In it, Augustine excitedly tells us about his reading of Cicero’s now…
Today’s One-Liner (#232)
The soul lives when it avoids the things which it is death to seek. –Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin
It’s Not Everyday Your Soul Gets Restored
“Rakitin,” [Alyosha Karamazov] suddenly said loudly and firmly, “don’t taunt me with having rebelled against my God. I don’t want to hold any anger against you, and therefore you be kinder, too. I’ve lost such…
Books You’ll Never Be Graded on Except by Reality
1. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Genesis, the Psalms. 2. The Gospel according to St. John. 3. St. Augustine, The Confessions 4. Plato, The Apology; The Crito; The Phaedo 5. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ. 6. The Epistles of St. Paul….
Endurable
“I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself that at any moment a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him his entire fortune. We are…