Category: Commonplace book

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

Today’s One-Liner (#284)

With this book, he came out of the intellectually unfashionable Christian closet. –Cynthia L. Haven on René Girard’s book, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, in her Evolution of Desire: A Life of…

Plenty of Time

Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That’s absolute nonsense. In the one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people….

Outright Joy

For the “romance” of Clare and Francis has always exuded a warmth and a brightness that cannot be accounted for by the actual events. I believe the source of that fire is partly our own…

Today’s One-Liner (#281)

Within the Christian tradition more than a suspicion exists that the more intelligent we are,  the more we consider ourselves to be “intellectuals,” the more difficult it is to save our souls.  –James V. Schall,…

The Jewish Inheritance

Leon Wieseltier also took pleasure in studying with Wiesel. The two would spend time on the phone analyzing, say, a poem by Hayim Nachman Bialik, or a rabbinical text or midrash. Wieseltier prized the “depth…

Today’s One-Liner (#280)

After [Elie Wiesel’s] death on July 2, 2016, the Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum praised him as an “heir of Jeremiah with his message of rebuke but also of Isaiah with his words of consolation.” –Joseph…

Today’s One-Liner (#279)

And while it’s nice to feel virtuous, it’s worth considering whether feeling virtuous and being virtuous are actually the same thing.  –Bret Easton Ellis, White, 89