Category: Commonplace book

Today’s One-Liner (#295)

Studying Torah day and night means positioning oneself at every moment to acquire Torah, which is itself a function of bearing the burden of another. –Ira F. Stone, A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of…

Today’s One-Liner (#294)

The Church’s claim is that we reach our fulfillment as human beings not by asserting ourselves, but by giving ourselves—by making ourselves into the gift to others that life itself is to us.  –George Weigel,…

Epigraphs

One use of his commonplaces was to supply mottoes for his own and others’ periodical essays.    Johnson’s adeptness in providing  epigraphs suggests something about how he read and filed away crystals of literature that…

Today’s One-Liner (#293)

This is that conquest of the world and of ourselves, which has been always considered as the perfection of human nature; and this is only to be obtained by fervent prayer, steady resolution, and frequent…

Today’s One-Liner (#292)

The four cardinal natural virtues are fertilizer for the spiritual soil in which the three theological virtues are to grow.  –Peter Kreeft, Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from Saint Thomas Aquinas, 113

First Things First

Let us look at our own shortcomings and leave other people’s alone; for those who live carefully ordered lives are apt to be shocked at everything and we might well learn very important lessons from…

Today’s One-Liner (#291)

In the West, too, appeared The Gulag Archipelago, his monumental three-volume exposé of the Soviet slave-labor system which single-handedly destroyed what remained of Western illusions about the great Communist experiment. –Joseph Epstein, Life Sentences: Literary…

What Makes for Peace

Do not think yourself better than others lest, perhaps, you be accounted worse before God Who knows what is in man. Do not take pride in your good deeds, for God’s judgments differ from those…

Today’s One-Liner (#288)

A spiritual man quickly recollects himself because he has never wasted his attention upon externals. –Thomas à  Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, translated by Aloysius Croft and Harold Bolton