Writing Daily
Often quoting Stendhal to the effect that one should “write every day, whether inspired or not,” Alain encouraged his students to sit down at a desk and write prolifically, as he did, at least two…
Category: Commonplace book
Today’s One-Liner (#130)
God deliver us from sullen saints! Saint Teresa of Ávila, in Rosemary Broughton, Praying with Teresa of Ávila
Today’s One-Liner (#112)
“He knows how to read better than any one; he gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears out the heart of it.” –Mrs. Knowles, on Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, The Life…
Today’s One-Liner (#110)
The temple of truth has never suffered so much from the woodpecker on the outside as from the termites within. –Vance Havner, quoted in Karen Hall, The Sound of Silence: The Life and Canceling of…
Today’s One-Liner (#108)
Nothing is more difficult to overcome than the problems we thought were already overcome.–Alexis de Tocqueville, via my friend Suzanne Renard
Today’s One-Liner (#106)
Instead of reading myths in the light of the Gospels, people have always read the Gospels in light of myths. –Rene Girard, Maxim #104, in All Desire Is a Desire for Being: Essential Writings, edited…
Today’s One-Liner (#98)
Consider yourself fortunate if, in the midst of such a whirlwind, you possess a guiding intelligence within yourself. –Marcus Aurelius, in Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
Russian Reflections on Kindness
1. When nineteenth-century novelists exposed the hypocrisy of cruel people pretending to be kind, observed Nadezhda Mandelstam, they testified to the unquestioned acceptance of kindness as a virtue. As La Rochefoucauld observed, hypocrisy is the…
Soul-Power
A healthy ego is transformed into a soul only via the burden of another who must impinge on the ego, causing the ego to shrink, as it were. –Ira F. Stone, A Responsible Life: The…
The Teachings
However little education a man may have, he cannot but know that Christ did not sanction murder, but taught kindness, meekness, forgiveness of injuries, love of one’s enemies—and therefore he cannot help seeing that on…