Category: Commonplace_1
-
Anna Akhmatova: “I Taught Myself to Live Simply…”
I taught myself to live simply and wisely, to look at the sky and pray to God, and to wander long before evening to tire my superfluous worries. When the burdocks rustle in the ravine and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops I compose happy verses about life’s decay, decay and beauty. I come back. The…
-
David Bentley Hart: Really To Know, One Must Love
…the truth of being is “poetic” before it is “rational” – indeed is rational precisely as a result of its supreme poetic coherence and richness of detail – and cannot be truly known if this order is reversed. Beauty is the beginning and end of all true knowledge: really to know anything, one must first…
-
Louise Erdrich: We look, to see if we are loved.
“I am like you, curious and small. Like you, I pause alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun’s slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved.” In her book, The Last Report on the…
-
T.S. Eliot: “…And Know The Place For The First Time”
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The…
-
Robert Caldini: “…operations… without thinking about them…”
“…civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.” from “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)” by Robert B. Cialdini PhD http://amzn.to/2bfBhX1
-
N.D. Wilson: “The world is rated R…”
The world is rated R and no one is checking tickets. Do not try to make it G by imagining the shadows away. N.D. Wilson
-
Miles Mathis: “Randomness is not art.”
Oh Fathers and Teachers, I claim that analysis is not art. Philosophy is not art. Politics is not art. Destruction is not art. Framing is not art. Finding is not art. Thinking is not art. Randomness is not art. Pathology is not art. Everything that a fool does easily is not art. Fathers and Teachers,…
-
Dorothy Sayers: “…filled with an inexplicable hostility…”
If we refuse assent to reality: if we rebel against the nature of things and choose to think that what we at the moment want is the centre of the universe to which everything else ought to accommodate itself, the first effect on us will be that the whole universe will seem to be…
-
“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.”
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. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses…