Category: Intellectuals

One-Pointed Attention

Make an orderly series of your different studies, so as to throw yourself into them completely. Let each task take entire hold of you, as if it were the only one. That was Napoleon’s secret;…

Have Your Pen Ready

Marginalia are the immediate indices of the reader’s response to the text, of the dialogue between the book and himself. –George Steiner, No Passion Spent  Essays 1978 — 1995

The Rules of Memorizing

St. Thomas proposes four rules: (1) To set in order what one wants to rememberbach; (2) to apply the mind deeply to it; (3) to think over it often; (4) when one wants to recollect…

Today’s One-Liner (#262)

What is necessary every moment is to be where  we ought to be and to do the thing that matters.  –AG Sertillanges, O.P., The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods, trans. Mary Ryan, 242

St. Thomas Aquinas

Sheer intellectual greatness is never so attractive, never appeals so much to the imagination and to the emotions as greatness of a more practical kind. That is why Napoleon, Caesar, and Joan of Arc will…

Conscience Thunders

King summoned the bold protest of ancient sources—“Today we particularly need the Hebrew prophets”—whose words had goaded the movement past fear and silence. “They did not believe that conscience is a still, small voice,” he…

From Rules to Virtue

Reimagining the moral life through the prism of the Beatitudes takes us from rules to virtues: from a rule-centered idea of morality to a virtue-centered idea of morality. The basic question changes from “How far…

This, But Not That

We’ve all seen self-deception of this kind on display in the reaction of Catholic educators to last Friday’s address by Pope Benedict. Having effectively divorced themselves from the Church with the 1967 Land O’ Lakes…