Category: My Commonplace Book

• Karl Rahner: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or will not exist at all.” 

  “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or will not exist at all.” 

• C.S. Lewis: writing advice

  

• Dylan Thomas: “Fern Hill”

  Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughsAbout the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,     The night above the dingle starry,          Time let me hail and climb     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple townsAnd once below a time I lordly had the…

• Seamus Heaney: “Postscript”

  

• William Butler Yeats: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

• Louise Perry: “Traditions are experiments that worked.”

• Neil Postman: Orwell vs. Huxley

  “We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another…

• Roger Scruton: “The past…is the property of others, who are not yet born.”

  We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.

• Pindar: “Become what you are, having learned what that is.”

  One of Nietzche’s favorite aphorisms.

• 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)