Today’s One-Liner (#271)
We have less reason to be surprised or offended when we find others differ from us in opinion, because we very often differ from ourselves. –Samuel Johnson, Adventurer 107, cited in Paul Fussell, Samuel Johnson…
Author: Mark J. Chmiel
The Depraved Intellect
Dante delineated a hierarchy of sins that, as a Thomist, he based on human reason. Thus the worst sins were lying, deceit, and treachery—the use of the intellect to subvert the truth rather than to…
Today’s One-Liner (#270)
I became and remain convinced that life has never been more thrillingly worth living than it was when Francis, Thomas, Innocent III, and Dante stalked this earth. —Ross J. S. Hoffman, in The Road to…
Look More Deeply
Therefore when we speak to a wicked man, we should speak to the good man inside him that is suppressed, the man who is being held prisoner. He is there. He needs someone to acknowledge…
Today’s One-Liner (#269)
I am a happy, old, white, Gentile, American, heterosexual, conservative, religious, Christian, Catholic, Evangelical, traditional, dogma-believing, hierarchical, authoritative, absolutistic, moralistic, repentant sinner. –Peter Kfreeft, From Calvinist to Catholic
Paying Close Attention
Francis showed great tenderness for all of God’s creatures, however humble. Remembering the Psalmist’s words: As for me, I am a worm and no man, he would pick up any earth-worms he found in his…
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
Dictionary Bliss
Most of us prefer novels, biographies and memoirs. However, there are always those, like Malcolm X or Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who see dictionaries as approachable texts and find magic in their method. –Henry Hitchings, Defining…
Today’s One-Liner (#267)
[Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language] easily ranks as one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one individual who labored under anything like the disadvantages in…
The Pleasure of Aphorisms
As most of the little book’s exegetes remark, the story [of Rasselas]–to term it so–is a thread upon which an extraordinary number of powerful adagio are precariously arranged in series. Johnson once remarked that he…