Know Your Purpose
Every man should, indeed, carefully compare his force with his undertaking; for though we ought not to live only for our own sakes, and though therefore danger or difficulty should not be avoided merely because…
Category: Commonplace book
Today’s One-Liner (#40)
We have all known the long loneliness, and we know that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community. –Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
Today’s One-Liner (#39)
« Dire que j’ai gâché des années de ma vie, que j’ai voulu mourir, que j’ai eu mon plus grand amour, pour une femme qui ne me plaisait pas, qui n’était pas mon genre !…
Writing and Reading Inter-Are/2
Johnson made such chains of learned reference in his writing, and his written works are the outgrowth of the kind of reading Johnson did, in which fragments of writing can be distributed under preexisting topics…
Today’s One-Liner (#34)
Extinguish pride as quickly as you would a fire. –Herakleitos, in Guy Davenport, Herakleitos and Diogenes
Isn’t This the Truth?
It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, a book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met. —Yoshida Kenkō, Essays in Idleness, translated by…
Fidelity
I am not Orthodox, nor am I religiously dogmatic, and my anti-secular views are very far from any proselytizing tendencies. But I am a son of Hillel Zeitlin and a grandson of great-grandfathers… the God-experience…
Know Your Purpose
By refusing to distract himself from the main task, by jealously guarding his energies for what really mattered, [Arthur] Waley was able to produce his vast corpus of work. Title is a key theme in…
Today’s One-Liner (#31)
They learn everything, except the art of learning. –Dorothy Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning
Today’s One-Liner (#30)
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. –Joan Didion, The White Album