The Crown of the Blessed
Moreover, if you do not steadily set your heart on Me, with a firm will to suffer everything for My sake, you will not be able to bear the heat of this battle or to…
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Today’s One-Liner (#268)
To make a man a saint, grace is certainly needed, and anyone who doubts this does not know what a saint, or a man, really is. –Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer, #869
Be Pro-Active
“What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? And if so, what…
Up to Marcel
I knew that my brain was like a mountain landscape rich in minerals, wherein lay vast and varied ores of great price. But should I have time to exploit them? For two reasons I was…
Slowpoke
Only dilettantes go to Spain for four weeks and come back with a novel about Spain. —Isaac Bashevis Singer: Conversations, edited by Grace Farrell, p. 153. In my case, I went to the Middle East…
Today’s One-Liner (#170)
We still protect crippled people, handicapped people, but in the center of it all we find a sort of cancer growing, which is the return to infanticide. –René Girard, Maxim #146, in All Desire Is a…
Today’s One-Liner (#133)
The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint. –Léon Bloy, quoted by Brad Miner
A Simple, Extraordinary Gift/2
I am engrossed these days rereading Nadezhda Mandelstam’s inspiring memoir, Hope Against Hope. It’s an account of her life with her husband, the acclaimed poet Osip Mandelstam who ran afoul of the revolutionaries of the…
Today’s One-Liner (#119)
Fortitude is the key to any great endeavor, and the only way to earn it is one small step at a time. –Lila Rose, Fighting for Life: Becoming a Force for Change in a Wounded…
“What Dreams May Come”
These passages, with their rich imagery and their unerring rhythmic ebb and flow, are among the most moving and complex speeches in our literature. But it is the soliloquy in the third act, “To be…