Category: My Commonplace Book

• 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…

• C.S. Lewis’ famous letter to Arthur Greeves on what Tolkein gave him.

• 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…

• An Odd Credo (Douglas Wilson)

  http://dougwils.com/s16-theology/an-odd-credo.html I believe that God is God, and that we are not. I believe that Jesus is our Savior, and that we are not. I believe that the Holy Spirit is our wisdom, and that we are not. I believe that Jesus died under the wrath of God for our sin, and that He was…

• Malcolm Muggeridge: “The depravity of man…most empirically verifiable reality…”

  “The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time most intellectually resisted fact”. Malcolm Muggeridge