Category: My Commonplace Book

• Oliver Wendell Holmes: on simplicity

  I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. Oliver Wendell Holmes, quoted in GTD, 141

• Wendell Berry: “Once you become involved in this sequence of lives, there is no way to escape the responsibility.” 

  Wendell Berry, the Kentucky poet / farmer / and my favorite luddite (I don’t think he’d dispute that last): “The obligation is very great and moves two ways. The old have an obligation to be exemplary, if they can–and since nobody can be completely exemplary, they also have an obligation to be intelligent about their…

• Jacques Ellul on the Frankenstein Phenomenon

  Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity. Not even the moral conversion of the technicians could make a difference. At best, they would cease to be good technicians. In…

• Jacques Barzun on Scalding the Frog Slowly

  When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. — Jacques Barzun, in From Dawn To Decadence…

• Jean-Francois Revel on Multicultural Insanity

  Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it. — Jean-François Revel, 1970

• Vladimir Lossky on True Mysticism

  There is, therefore, no Christian mysticism without theology; but, above all, there is no theology without mysticism. It is not by chance that the tradition of the Eastern Church has reserved the name of ‘theologian’ peculiarly for three sacred writers of whom the first is St. John, most ‘mystical’ of the four Evangelists; the second…

• Vladimir Lossky On Living the Dogma

  …we must live the dogma expressing a revealed truth, which appears to us as an unfathomable mystery, in such a fashion that instead of assimilating the mystery to our mode of understanding, we should, on the contrary, look for a profound change, an inner transformation of spirit, enabling us to experience it mystically.

• Thomas Merton: opening line from “Seven Story Mountain”

  “On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadows of some French mountains on the borders of Spain, I came into the world.”

• Thomas Merton on Integ-rity

  “The worst thing that can happen to a person who is already divided up into a dozen different compartments is to seal off yet another compartment and tell him that this one is more important than all others, and that he must henceforth exercise a special care in keeping it separate from them. That is…

• Portrait of a Good Teacher (Memories of Mark Van Doren)

  Mark Van Doren’s students remember him, and their comments taken together are the job description of a teacher [old link is dead] ************************* …the reason Van Doren exerted such a strong force on students, especially those with big literary and intellectual ambitions, was that he had no agenda, no outsized ego, and he treated them…