Category: Commonplace book

Reading the Psalms

 How I cried out to you, my God, when I read the Psalms of David,  those hymns of faith, those songs of a pious heart in which the spirit  of pride can find no place!…

Effort

A professor had a wife who never had dinner ready on time and every day he had to sit around waiting.  Suddenly it occurred to him that he could utilize this time and he began…

A Zone of Silence

Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the…

Nadezhda

Why, at the dawn of the new era, at the very beginning of the fratricidal twentieth century, was I given the name Nadezhda [“Hope” ] ? All I now heard from our friends and acquaintances…

Wake Up Already!

In our own place and time, we have made a science of escape and sleep. Rather than live at that sharp edge of life, awake and alert, we pretend that we have no sin. There…

Writing Daily

Often quoting Stendhal to the effect that one should “write every day, whether inspired or not,” Alain encouraged his students to sit down at a desk and write prolifically, as he did, at least two…

Today’s One-Liner (#112)

“He knows how to read better than any one; he gets at the substance of a book directly; he tears out the heart of it.” –Mrs. Knowles, on Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, The Life…

Today’s One-Liner (#110)

The temple of truth has never suffered so much from the woodpecker on the outside as from the termites within.  –Vance Havner, quoted in Karen Hall, The Sound of Silence: The Life and Canceling of…