A Simplifying Renunciation
Thus, you should carefully consider which among the main things you want in life is the most important, and renounce all the others to dedicate yourself to that thing alone. Among the many matters that…
Category: Classics
First Things First
One’s education must first of all be directed to a thorough knowledge of the classics and an understanding of the teachings of the sages. –—Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness, translated by Meredith McKinney, 80
Today’s One-Liner (#347)
A great literary masterwork is made for minds quite as serious as those engaged in the science of medicine. –Ezra Pound, Literary Essays
He Forgot to Repeat His Mantram
“Go from my presence, O monstrous deformity of nature, depository of lies, storehouse of deceits, granary of villainies, inventor of iniquities, publisher of absurdities, and enemy of that respect that is due royal personages! Begone…
All-time Greats
By the novel of ideas I mean realist fiction, focused on the complexities of human psychology and the social conditions peculiar to a specific time and place, that tests theories by examining the sources of…
Tears Every Time
Thank you, Andrew Ivers, for sending this to me again!
If Not Now, When?
For I felt that I was still the captive of my sins, and in my misery I kept crying ’How long shall I go on saying “tomorrow, tomorrow”? Why not now? Why not make an…
Today’s One-Liner (#310)
Everyone should read at one point in his life Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. –James Schall, S.J., A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning, 34
Chaos of the Now
Yet of Plutarch, the Ancilla to Classical Reading says, “He has indubitably had more European readers than any other pagan Greek and has been the greatest single channel communicating to Europe a general sense of…
Never Out-of-Date
Cicero lived some five hundred years before Augustine. He himself sent his own son to Greece to study philosophy. Cicero wrote to his son a famous letter, the famous On Duties, which attempted to explain…