Category: My Commonplace Book

• Paul Valery: “The gods in their graciousness give us an occasional first line for nothing…”

  “The gods in their graciousness give us an occasional first line for nothing; but it is for us to fashion the second, which must chime with the first and not be unworthy of its supernatural elder.”       -Paul Valery: The Art of Poetry, p.18

• Moral action is metaphysical identity

  Moral action is metaphysical identity.  

• Doug Stuart: “Do the right thing and…”

  “Do the right thing and the right thing will happen.” – Doug Stuart

• Owen Barfield on conversation: “To Plato, dialogue was a tokos–a begetting…”

  To Plato, dialogue was a tokos–a begetting; the words of one speaker were conceived of as merely the instruments by which true thinking, itself beyond words, was ‘begotten’ or generated in another.”                In “Speech, Reason and Imagination” (in Romanticism Comes of Age) by Owen Barfield

• Flannery O’Connor on “just a symbol”

  “Well, if it’s just a symbol, then to hell with it.” Flannery O’Connor

• Anders Nygren on questions

  “To a wrongly stated question there can be no right answer. …a fundamental question stated in a certain way can hold the minds of men in bondage for centuries, not to say millenia.” Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, p.47

• Meister Eckhart on images

  “An image, and the thing of which it is an image, are not separate; they are not two substances…An image is strictly an emanation….A thing’s image grows out of itself and grows upon itself.“ Meister Eckhart ? Quoted in Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages…p. 113

• Doctor Zhivago on art: “…resembles and continues the Revelation of St. John”

  “More vividly than ever before he realized that art has two constant, two unending concerns: it always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St. John.” (from the scene where Zhivago is walking behind the funeral procession of his friend)

• Mencken on liberalism: “the machinations of werewolves…in Wall Street”

  “The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts…[he] ascribes all his failures to get on in the world, all of his congenital incapacity and damfoolishness, to the machinations of werewolves assembled in Wall Street, or some other such den of…

• Dorothy Sayers: The Lost Tools of Learning

  That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited, should presume to discuss education is a matter, surely, that calls for no apology. It is a kind of behavior to which the present climate of opinion is wholly favorable. Bishops air their opinions about economics; biologists, about metaphysics; inorganic chemists, about theology; the most irrelevant…