Category: Commonplace book

Today’s One-Liner (#328)

The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him from error to truth. –Saint Thomas Aquinas, in Josef Pieper, The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas, #128

Getting to Know New York

Although I was poor, it never bothered me. I went to the library and I could read. I liked to go on the Fifth Avenue bus, which had an upper level, just to sit there…

Today’s One-Liner (#327)

We always love to discuss and reveal character because human character is to us the greatest puzzle. –Isaac Bashevis Singer, in Conversations with Isaac Bashevis Singer, interviews by Richard Burgin, p. 47

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…

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,…

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…