Category: Intellectuals

This, But Not That

We’ve all seen self-deception of this kind on display in the reaction of Catholic educators to last Friday’s address by Pope Benedict. Having effectively divorced themselves from the Church with the 1967 Land O’ Lakes…

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.

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…