Simplify
For there are only three kinds of good. So if a thing is not virtuous, useful, or pleasant, it’s not really good. So fagetaboutit! Simplify your life by throwing out all the things you have…
Category: Commonplace book
Today’s One-Liner (#326)
My greatest skill has been to want but little. –Henry David Thoreau, in Tim Flinders, Henry David Thoreau: Spiritual and Prophetic Writings, 15
Today’s One-Liner (#325)
I believe in Buddha kindness and nothing else, I believe in Heaven, in Angels, I eschew all Marxism and allied horseshit and psychoanalysis, and offshoot therefrom. –Jack Kerouac, Letter to Allen Ginsberg, January 1958
Keep at It
If there is one thing I have learned from Mother Angelica and Father Fessio, two of the brightest stars in the Church today, it is that good ideas ought to be pursued, and then one…
Today’s One-Liner (#324)
The great authors, those to whom we go back again and again throughout our lives, Shakespeare and Dante, for example, are inexhaustible. –Ralph McInerny, I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You: My Life and Pastimes,…
Today’s One-Liner (#321)
With detachment, life’s ups and downs need hardly affect our security at all. –Eknath Easwaran, Original Goodness: On the Beatitudes, 136
A Brother’s Gift
To the Jews who, in the sixties, envied the Black Power Movement; who in the nineties envied the Palestinians; who weep at Exodus but jeer at the Israel Defense Forces; who nod when Tevye praises…
Today’s One-Liner (#320)
The Jew is not only made and instructed but also commanded to live in the world and to enjoy those things that God permitted him—among the chiefest joys: that of belonging. –David Mamet, The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism,…
Take Your Pick
What is the essence of Christ’s ministry? He teaches men “not to commit stupidities.” All of Tolstoy’s brutal empiricism and aristocratic impatience resound in that extraordinary answer. The Dostoevskyan Christ, on the contrary, teaches men…
The Crown of the Blessed
Moreover, if you do not steadily set your heart on Me, with a firm will to suffer everything for My sake, you will not be able to bear the heat of this battle or to…