Category: Commonplace book

Two Kinds of People

Go back to Socrates: “Know thyself.” For Socrates, there are only two kinds of people: the wise, who know they are fools; and fools, who think they are wise. Similarly, for Christ and all the…

Today’s One-Liner (#314)

When your relationships become strained we can ask ourselves what Jesus would have done—or, when that seems too lofty, what Saint Teresa or Saint Francis would have done.  –Eknath Easwaran, Original Goodness: On the Beatitudes,…

Time Management

The famous author of western stories, Louis L’Amour, wrote a very marvelous memoir called The Education of a Wandering Man. No book is better than this one for telling us how to find the time…

Today’s One-Liner (#311)

Reflect that in this world nothing but virtue and devotion can satisfy your soul. –Saint Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, trans. John K. Ryan, 270

Experience and Expectation

Let me also recall Samuel Johnson, whose famous biography by his devotee Boswell is, I think, something along with the Bible that you should read a bit every day, if only for the delight of…

Choices Make Habits

St. Thomas, as usual, is the apostle of common sense. Virtue, like reason and language, is in us by nature potentially—we are designed for it—but since the actualization of this potentiality depends on our free…

Chaos of the Now

Yet of Plutarch, the Ancilla to Classical Reading says, “He has indubitably had more European readers than any other pagan Greek and has been the greatest single channel communicating to Europe a general sense of…

Clarity

One ought to be clear about at least a few matters — war, capital killing, aborting the unborn!  Isaiah invites such clarity, and in a sense, leaves to us the conclusions, the details, the issues. …