Category: Commonplace book

Today’s One-Liner (#238)

And every day, down to this day, I have remembered the long-suffering servant of God, Mikhail, in my prayers. –Starets Zosima, in Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

St. Thomas Aquinas

Sheer intellectual greatness is never so attractive, never appeals so much to the imagination and to the emotions as greatness of a more practical kind. That is why Napoleon, Caesar, and Joan of Arc will…

Today’s One-Liner (#237)

Inordinate fear is included in every sin; the miser fears the loss of money, the intemperate man the loss of pleasure. –Saint Thomas Aquinas, in Josef Pieper, The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas, #302

Long Live Reason

To judge one’s own judgment: this can only be done by the reason, which reflects on its own act and knows the relation between that upon which it judges and that by which it judges….

Today’s One-Liner (#235)

We are not free unless we are good, and we are not good unless we listen to reason. –Peter Kreeft, Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from Saint Thomas Aquinas–350+ Ways Your Mind Can Help You Become…

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…

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…