Category: Wisdom Traditions

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

Today’s One-Liner (#96)

I boasted to Rakitin that I gave an onion, but I’ll say it differently to you: in my whole life I’ve given just one little onion, that’s how much good I’ve done. –Grushenka to Alyosha,…

Today’s One-Liner (#91)

It is not in our power to explain either the prosperity of the wicked or the afflictions of the righteous. –R. Yannai, in Joseph Hertz, Sayings of the Fathers 

Today’s One-Liner (#90)

The fight for the dignity of all human life—and ultimately for a world that is more just, more beautiful, and more loving—needs all of us. –Lila Rose, Fighting for Life: Becoming a Force for Change…

Today’s One-Liner (#86)

I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise. –Dr. Samuel Johnson, quoted by James Boswell in The Life of Samuel Johnson

Today’s One-Liner (#85)

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done:  and there is no new thing under the sun. –Koheleth, 1:9, King James…

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…

Reading “Job”

There were ample precedents in Dostoevsky’s work for his thematic focus on the problem of theodicy raised by Ivan—the problem of the existence of evil and suffering in a world presumably created by a God…