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.
Category: Intellectuals
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 (#168)
We live in a culture dominated by a lower vision. –James V. Schall, S.J., On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing
Engrave with Gusto
On the other hand, having to learn from men by reading, teaching, contact, appreciate the sense of this golden rule inserted by St. Thomas in the middle of his Sixteen Precepts: “Do not consider from…
Today’s One-Liner (#162)
The world is in danger for lack of life-giving maxims. –A.G. Sertillanges, O.P., The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, translated by Mary Ryan
Getting Free
Olga Katunal [was] a political activist who eventually left the Communist party and returned to Judaism via German philosophy. …[She] made more radical choices when she abandoned Trotsky for Moses in the interwar years. –Judith…
Know Thyself
Success in every order is always attained on the same conditions: to reflect at the start, to begin at the beginning, to proceed methodically, to advance slowly, to give out all one’s strength. But the…
Something I Came across in Tablet
Consider, for a moment, the road traveled by many American Jews these past 15 months. One day, they were members in good standing of a virtuous, unimpeachable community of people who attended the finest schools,…
Advice from 1921
Therefore, be slow to speak and slow to go to those places where people speak, because in many words the spirit is poured out like water; by your amiability to all, purchase the right really…