Ecclesiastes
Compared with the neat little nostrums of comfort-mongering minds who cross our t’s and dot our i’s, Ecclesiastes is as great, as deep, and as terrifying as the ocean. If this philosopher were alive today…
Category: Classics
Today’s One-Liner (#233)
I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. —Ecclesiastes, 1: 14
For the Young
St. Augustine’s famous Confessions is a book directed to the very heart of each young person. No other book is quite like it. In it, Augustine excitedly tells us about his reading of Cicero’s now…
Today’s One-Liner (#232)
The soul lives when it avoids the things which it is death to seek. –Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin
It’s Not Everyday Your Soul Gets Restored
“Rakitin,” [Alyosha Karamazov] suddenly said loudly and firmly, “don’t taunt me with having rebelled against my God. I don’t want to hold any anger against you, and therefore you be kinder, too. I’ve lost such…
Books You’ll Never Be Graded on Except by Reality
1. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Genesis, the Psalms. 2. The Gospel according to St. John. 3. St. Augustine, The Confessions 4. Plato, The Apology; The Crito; The Phaedo 5. Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ. 6. The Epistles of St. Paul….
Endurable
“I was like a pauper who moistens his dry crust with fewer tears if he assures himself that at any moment a total stranger is perhaps going to leave him his entire fortune. We are…
Today’s One-Liner (#179)
Anxiety about what I could believe as certain gnawed at my heart all the more sharply as I grew more and more ashamed that I had been misled and deluded by promises of certainty for…
Today’s One-Liner (#100)
The best way to get even with them is not to resemble them. –Marcus Aurelius, in Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
Today’s One-Liner (#99)
Undisturbed calmness of mind is attained by cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and indifference toward the wicked. –Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda, How to Know God: The…