My Commonplace Book. Notes from my reading. No special order.
- “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.”
- “An explained thing…is almost inevitably explained away.”
- “The other…embarks within the mind of the knower”
- “THEORY” From “The Scheme of Things” by Allen Wheelis
- “There is a brilliantly worded explanation for this.”
- “Prayer of Incompetence”
- Adrienne von Speyr”: Beauty is not a subjective judgment of taste but a transcendental characteristic of all being that raptures the subject away from itself.” — Dr. Adrienne von Speyr (1902-1967) on the aesthetic theology of her confessor, Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988)
- Alan Jacobs: that dialogue is between persons, not words on a page
- Alan Jacobs…”…the essay form is the literary representation of a man thinking…”
- Alexis de Tocqueville: “…bribe the public with the public’s money…”
- Alice Walker’s distraction
- Alister McGrath on Dawkins: “an embarassment to atheists”.
- An Odd Credo (Douglas Wilson)
- Anders Nygren on questions
- Ann Lewin, poem on prayer
- Anna Akhmatova: “I Taught Myself to Live Simply…”
- Annie Dillard: “…the sleeping god may wake some day…”
- artist Julie Dermansky on discipline
- Aslan: The Doctrine and Practice of Revelation
- Aulen: Pascha and atonement
- Bob Dylan on “what a song is about”
- Boris Pasternak: “Lara walked along the tracks…to call each thing by its right name.”
- Brandon Marsalis: “There is no freedom in freedom, my man…”
- Bruce Charlton: “…continuous revelation…to sustain scripture, reason, tradition…”
- C. S. Lewis: On The Medieval Sky
- C.S. Lewis on the empty universe
- C.S. Lewis: “…a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans.”
- C.S. Lewis: “…what you see and hear…depends on what sort of person you are.”
- C.S. Lewis: “…Although the witch knew the deep magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know…
- C.S. Lewis: “…my desire for Paradise…”
- C.S. Lewis: “The scholar has lived in many times…”
- C.S. Lewis: on children’s fears
- C.S. Lewis’ famous letter to Arthur Greeves on what Tolkein gave him.
- Charles Murray: “…to make observed human nature compatible with theoretical schemes…”
- Charles Taylor: “Civilization is…”
- Charles Taylor: St. Francis and the Particular
- Charles Williams: “To know a thing is to recognize its first cause.”
- Christian Wiman: “‘The task is not to “believe” in a life beyond this one; the task is to perceive it. …”
- Christina Rossetti: In the Bleak Midwinter
- Confessing Sin in Narnia, by Douglas Wilson
- Czeslaw Milosz: “Gift”
- Dallas Willard: “…the good news of the presence…”
- Dallas Willard: Discipleship is no essential part of Christianity today
- Dallas Willard: Paralyzed by grace
- Daniel Nayeri: “Every story is a storyteller pleading to live forever.”
- David Allen on a clear mind
- David Allen: “…the same thought twice…”
- David Bentley Hart: “Suffering has no intrinsic meaning at all…”
- David Bentley Hart: On whether a secular civilization is possible
- David Bentley Hart: Really To Know, One Must Love
- David Bentley Hart: “…actus essendi subsistens…”
- David Bentley Hart: “…things we know before we can speak them…”
- David Hart on Beauty and Love
- David Hart on Primal Distance
- David Hart on the Christian Basis for Religious Freedom
- David Hart: “A Form Evoking Desire”
- David Hart: “A Hermeneutical Labor”
- David Hart: “An Exilic Interiority”
- David Hart: “Beauty evokes desire”
- David Hart: “The contents of the creed…”
- David Hart: “Conceptual grammar” allows knowledge
- David Hart: “Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience…”
- David Hart: Delight As A Mode Of Knowledge
- David Wagoner: “Lost”
- Denise Levertov: “On the Mystery of the Incarnation”
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “…a new type of monasticism…”
- Doctor Zhivago on art: “…resembles and continues the Revelation of St. John”
- Donald Justice: “The Wall”
- Dorothy Sayers: “…filled with an inexplicable hostility…”
- Dorothy Sayers: The Lost Tools of Learning
- Dorothy Sayers: “…the neglect of dogma is the curse of nearly all religious plays.”
- Doug Stuart: “Do the right thing and…”
- Doug Wilson, on Eucharist: “…do not close your eyes…”
- Doug Wilson: Bland Leading the Bland
- Douglas Wilson, on Eucharist: “You belong here. A place at this Table was purchased for you through the blood of Jesus Christ. He invites you to come and eat, come and drink. Come. We insist.”
- Douglas Wilson: “Fathers are jovial and open-handed”
- Douglas Wilson: on what “Twilight” says about love.
- Douglas Wilson: That kindness doesn’t scale to the collective.
- Douglas Wilson: Worship as political strategy
- Dougles Wilson: On Children In Church
- Elizabeth Bishop: “Insomnia”
- Epstein on Valery on politics: politics gets a portion of the contempt it deserves
- Eugene Peterson: “…God is doing something before I know it.”
- Flannery O’Connor on “just a symbol”
- Flannery O’Connor: “…stifled with all deliberate speed…”
- Flannery O’Connor: “…the devil has been the unwilling instrument of grace.”
- Flannery O’Connor: “…too stupid to enter the past…”
- Flannery O’Connor: “the Price of Restoration”
- G. K. Chesterton on dragons
- G. K. Chesterton: “…the carpe diem religion…”
- G. K. Chesterton: “Nobody has any business to use the word “progress” unless he has a definite creed and a cast-iron code of morals…”
- G.K. Chesterton on Children at Play
- G.K. Chesterton on Design
- G.K. Chesterton on the Kingdom
- G.K. Chesterton: “The Fairies May Or May Not Exist”
- G.K. Chesterton: “They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.”
- Geoffrey Hill: “ No Bloodless Myth Will Hold”
- George MacDonald on people who want to govern
- Gerard Manley Hopkins: “God’s Grandeur”
- Goethe on assimilating Tradition
- Goethe: “…talk less, draw more”.
- Gratia Non Tollit Naturam Sed Perficit
- Gregory Nazianzen on Advent: “A bearer of flesh, but, even so, beyond all body.”
- Gregory Nazianzen: “Quod non assumpsit, non sanavit”
- Gustaf Aulen: on the paschal season
- Hazlitt: on Government Credit, from “Economics”
- Horace: “Naturam expellas furca…”
- Isak Denison: excerpt from “Out Of Africa”, on stillness in the wild.
- J.I. Packer: “Live slowly enough…”
- J.R.R. Tolkien, to his son: “…the real soul-mate…”
- J.R.R. Tolkien: on “eucatastrophe”
- Jacques Barzun on Scalding the Frog Slowly
- Jacques Ellul on the Frankenstein Phenomenon
- Jean-Francois Revel on Multicultural Insanity
- Jewish Proverb: “Did you enjoy my world?”
- John Howard Yoder on patience in faithfulness
- John Milton on the government’s role in the bailout
- John Milton: “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”
- John Ruskin on design, using organic forms
- John Ruskin: “…it is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made happy…
- John V. Taylor: Poem…“Over the swinging parapet…”
- John Wesley: “…I felt my heart strangely warmed…”
- Josef Peiper: “In worship, a store of superfluous wealth is squandered.” 
- Josef Pieper: Leisure cannot be found when sought as a means to any end.
- Josef Pieper: “…there is no such thing as a festival without Gods…” 
- Josef Pieper..”…only the silent hear…”
- Joseph Epstein: on reading
- Jung: “Thinking is difficult…”
- Jürgen Habermas: “…and the Christian ethic of love…everything else is idle postmodern talk”
- Kant: Either a price or a dignity
- Katsushika Hokusai: How long for artists to learn…
- Liberalism: suicide by…greed
- Louise Erdrich: We look, to see if we are loved.
- Louise Gluck: “We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”
- Madeleine L’Engle: “…the irrational season…”
- Malcolm Muggeridge: “The depravity of man…most empirically verifiable reality…”
- Marilynn Robinson: Paris Review interview, quotes
- Mary Oliver: “Let me keep my mind on what matters…”
- Mary Oliver: “…with your one wild and precious life.”
- Mary Oliver: “A poem should always have birds in it.”
- Mary Oliver: “To pay attention…”
- Mary Oliver: “What wretchedness…”
- Mary Oliver: “When it’s over…”
- Mary Oliver: from her poem “Praying”.
- Mary Oliver: from her poem “Sometimes”
- Mary Ruefle: “I used to think I wrote…”
- Mary Ruefle: Metaphor is “…an exchange of energy between two things…”
- Masai Creed: “The Hyenas Did Not Touch Him”
- Meister Eckhart on images
- Meister Eckhart on Simplicity
- Meister Eckhart: 20th sign of genuine seers: “…they will let him prevail…”
- Meister Eckhart: “…one man whose mind is free from notions and from forms…”
- Meister Eckhart: “God is…innocent and free…”
- Meister Eckhart: “…I cannot be a heretic…”
- Mencken on liberalism: “the machinations of werewolves…in Wall Street”
- Michael Lewis: Two teachers, but in this order.
- Michael Spencer: Captured by the Gospel
- Miles Mathis: “Randomness is not art.”
- Moral action is metaphysical identity
- N.D. Wilson: “The world is rated R…”
- Neil Postman: Orwell vs. Huxley
- New Bracelet Acronym: JPTT (Just Preach the Text)
- Nouwen: The Discipline of Gratitude
- O.H.Mowrer on feelings as followers
- Oliver Wendell Holmes: on simplicity
- On Christians Arguing Online: “…the war-mongering matrix of apologetics.”
- Origin: “[Christ] rescues us from all irrationality.”
- Oscar Wilde: “…my diary…something sensational to read on the train.”
- Our genes are selfish, but we can decide whether to evolve or not
- Owen Barfield on conversation: “To Plato, dialogue was a tokos–a begetting…”
- Owen Barfield on the language of poetry
- Paul Elie, on Thomas Merton, on Conversation
- Paul Elie: defines “pilgrimage”
- Paul Valery: “The gods in their graciousness give us an occasional first line for nothing…”
- Pavel Florensky: “…who repeats after you the lessons of love.”
- Peter Kreeft: Modernism As Rationalized Promiscuity
- Peter Leithart: Wedding Sermon
- Peter Leithart: Modernity as Ingratitude
- Peter Leithart: Modesty – the Awareness that Knowledge has a Time.
- Peter Leithart: Virgil, on the tears of things…
- Philip Yancey: “A memory is…”
- Pindar: “Become what you are, having learned what that is.”
- Polonius and Hamlet discuss justice.
- Portrait of a Good Teacher (Memories of Mark Van Doren)
- Quote: “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion”
- Quotes from here and there I’ve not categorized
- Raymond Chandler: “…all this fairy gold…”
- Rene Girard on Mousetrap Atonement
- Robert Caldini: “…operations… without thinking about them…”
- Roger Scruton: “The past…is the property of others, who are not yet born.”
- Rosenstock-Huess: “By falling in love…one’s eyes are opened…”
- Ruth Bidgood: “No need to wonder…”
- Shakespeare: from the end of King Lear
- Shakespeare: on keeping promises
- Soren Kierkegaard: “If one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right. ”
- St. John Of The Cross: “The Dark Night of the Soul”
- Studeo: eager to study
- T.S. Eliot: “Little Gidding” (excerpt )
- T.S. Eliot: “…And Know The Place For The First Time”
- The First Object of Government: Thwart the Majority’s Theft
- The Roman Exorcism Rite: “…Ipse venena bibas…”
- The Saints Say the Same Thing
- The short life of the nation-state: 1789 to 1918 (Peter Leithart)
- The Soft Bigotry of Tourist Environmentalists
- Theodore Dalrymple: The False Apology Syndrome
- Thomas Merton on Integ-rity
- Thomas Merton: “…pierced through the surface and got beyond the shadow and the disguise.”
- Thomas Merton: “If I can unite in myself…”
- Thomas Merton: “The Trappist Abbey: Matins”
- Thomas Merton: “To seek to solve the problem of God is to seek to see one’s own eyes.”
- Thomas Merton: “…They never succeed in being themselves.”
- Thomas Merton: closing passage of Seven Story Mountain
- Thomas Merton: opening line from “Seven Story Mountain”
- Tony Esolen: “…an egalitarian destroys the very things whose equality he asserts.”
- Tony Esolen: “All Flattened Things Are Equal”
- Unknown: To Replace A Lightbulb
- Unknown…”Dogma Keeps us away from the ditches.”
- Victor Davis Hanson: “…the West itself…vanished on the altar of therapy.”
- Vladimir Lossky On Living the Dogma
- Vladimir Lossky on True Mysticism
- Vladimir Lossky: “…an intellectual discipline of the non-opposition of opposites…”
- Vladimir Nabakov: “the symbolism racket in schools”
- Voltaire: “I don’t believe in God, but I hope my valet does so he doesn’t steal my spoons.”
- W. H. Auden: “Friday’s Child”
- Walker Percy: “A poor show.”
- Walt Whitman: “I think I will do nothing for a long time…”
- Walter Breuggemann: “God-making”
- Walter Breuggemann: On Land As Inheritance
- Walter Brueggemann: “Prosperity breeds amnesia”
- Wendell Berry: “The Peace Of Wild Things”
- Wendell Berry: “Once you become involved in this sequence of lives, there is no way to escape the responsibility.”
- Who to marry: Esolen’s rules:
- William Butler Yeats: “The Second Coming”
- Zola: On Art