General Life Advice
Use the talents you possess, for the woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except the best. – Henry van Dyke
Pride is faith in the idea that God had, when he made us. A proud man is conscious of the idea, and aspires to realize it. He does not strive towards a happiness, or comfort, which may be irrelevant to God’s idea of him. His success is the idea of God, successfully carried through, and he is in love with his destiny. – Karen Blixen (pen name: Isak Dinesen)
Be the master of your will and the slave of your conscience. – Hasidic saying
Everyone must choose one of two pains: The pain of discipline or the pain of regret. – Jim Rohn
Only the disciplined are free. – Eliud Kipchoge
Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily; and why older persons, especially if vain or important, cannot learn at all. – Thomas Szasz
If you disagree with someone, you had better be able to state their case better than they can. Otherwise, be quiet. – Charlie Munger
You can’t know all the times that you’ve hurt people in tiny, significant ways. It’s easy to be cruel without meaning to be. There’s nothing you can do about that. But you can choose to be kind. Be kind. – Hannah Easterson
Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success. – William Saroyan
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. – Calvin Coolidge
Human Fallenness
All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you./I never had a selfless thought since I was born. – C. S. Lewis
If all men knew what others say of them, there would not be four friends in the world. – Blaise Pascal
I still think the London Times Literary Supplement was substantially correct when it wrote some years ago: “The doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”
– Reinhold Niebuhr
We would often be ashamed of our finest actions if the world understood all the motives which produced them. – Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
I believe there is no one Principle, which predominates in human Nature so much in every stage of Life, from the Cradle to the Grave, in Males and females, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, high and low, as this Passion for Superiority …. Every human Being compares itself in its own Imagination, with every other round about it, and will find some Superiority over every other real or imaginary, or it will die of Grief and Vexation. – John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, 22 May 1777
(written when John was 42 and Abigail 33, while she was at home in Braintree, Massachusetts and he was in Philadelphia, severing as a member of the Continental Congress)
The fortunate man is seldom satisfied with the fact of being fortunate, beyond this he needs to know that he has a right to his good fortune. He wants to be convinced he deserves it and above all that he deserves it in comparison with others. Good fortune, thus wants to be legitimate fortune. – Max Weber
Don’t be yourself. Be someone a little nicer. – Mignon McLaughlin
Normal is the average of deviance. –Rita Mae Brown
The African Queen
ALLNUT
Feller takes a drop too much once in
a while. T’s only yoomin nyture.
ROSE
(remotely)
Nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what we are
put into this world to rise above.
West Side Story
DOC
What does it take to get through to you? When do you stop?
You make this world lousy!
ACTION
That’s the way we found it, Doc.
[Film version:]
DOC
You make this world lousy!
ACTION
We didn’t make it.
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
Weddings
But some couples remain tempted today by the opportunity that a wedding offers for self-expression. It is a temptation that should be resisted. . . .
If the bride and groom have intimacies to whisper, there are private places for that. A wedding is public business. That is the point of it. The couple are not merely marrying one another. They are joining the enterprise of the human race. They are, at least in part, submitting themselves to the larger logics of life, to the survival of the community, to life itself. They enter into a contract with processes deeper than they can know. At the moment of their binding, they should subsume their egos into that larger business within which their small lyricisms become tinny and exhibitionistic. The ceremony dignifies the couple precisely to the degree that they lose themselves therein. The mystery of what they do is more interesting than they can ever be. – Lance Morrow
Parenthood
To be [to your child] Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes, and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, matters, theology and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? – G.K. Chesterton
The days go by slowly but the years go by quickly – Anon
Luke 2:48, the Holy Family having a spat.
“Your mother was WORRIED SICK about you!”
Simone Martini, “Christ Returning to his Parents” (1342, France)
Tempera on wood, 49,5 x 35 cm, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Writing & Speaking
I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline. – Duke Ellington
The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things. – Thomas Hardy
If it is to be a minute speech I shall need four weeks in which to prepare, if a half hour speech, then two weeks, but if I am to talk all day I’m ready now. – Rufus Choates, Massachusetts Senator
To begin with, [a book project] is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress. Then it becomes a master. Then it becomes a tyrant. And the last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him out to the public. – Winston Churchill
One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines. – Emile Zola
Death & Dying
One of the most astonishing things about the human experience is the realization that loved ones die. The first time it happens, we are invariably amazed that nearly everyone who has ever lived has weathered an experience so wrenching. We see other humans on the street and in the shops and marvel that they manage to simply go about their business – that there is no constant, universal primal scream in the face of such an awful fact. – NY Times Editorial 4/1/05, on the passing of Teresa Marie Schaivo
At 79, [Billy] Graham says he is unafraid of death. Still, there are some things he would have done differently. “I should have studied more and prayed more and spent more time with my family,” he says. – Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY 02/05/98
Christian Hope
[F]or whatever reason God chose to make man as he is–limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death–He had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horror of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worth while. – Dorothy L. Sayers
That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find Him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as News; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it News, and good news at that…. – Dorothy L. Sayers
It would be worthless to have an economic liberation
in which all the poor had their own house,
their own money,
but were all sinners,
their hearts estranged from God.
What good would it be?
There are nations at present
that are economically and socially quite advanced,
for example those of northern Europe,
and yet how much vice and excess!
The church will always have its word to say:
conversion.
Progress will not be completed
even if we organize ideally the economy
and the political and social orders of our people.
It won’t be entire with that.
That will be the basis,
so that it can be completed
by what the church pursues and proclaims;
God adored by all,
Christ acknowledged as only Savior,
deep joy of spirit
in being at peace with God
and with our brothers and sisters.
– Archbishop Óscar Romero, The Violence of Love
Once we have seen Him in a stable, we can never be sure where He will appear or to what lengths He will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation He will descend in His wild pursuit of men. – Frederick Buechner
Leadership, Politics
There are leaders the people fear.
There are leaders the people hate.
There are leaders the people love.
But when the best leaders of all have finished their work,
The PEOPLE say, ‘WE DID IT OURSELVES.’
– Lao Tzu
Patriotism is proud of a country’s virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country’s virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, “the greatest”, but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is. – Sydney J. Harris
Dec. 7, 1970, der Kniefall von Warschau: German Chancellor Willy Brandt spontaneously kneeling at the Ghetto Heroes Monument in Warsaw, Poland
Three C. S. Lewis Quotes
The price of Christ is something, in a way, much easier than moral effort–it is to want Him. It is true that the wanting itself would be beyond our power but for one fact. The world is so built that, to help us desert our own satisfactions, they desert us. War and trouble and finally old age take from us one by one all those things that the natural Self hoped for at its setting out. Begging is our only wisdom, and want in the end makes it easier for us to be beggars. Even on those terms Mercy will receive us. (“Three Kinds of Men”)
In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter…. though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists… (“The Weight of Glory”)
The world rings with praise—lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favourite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favourite game—praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least. The good critics found something to praise in many imperfect works; the bad ones continually narrowed the list of books we might be allowed to read. The healthy and unaffected man, even if luxuriously brought up and widely experienced in good cookery, could praise a very modest meal; the dyspeptic and the snob found fault with all. Except where intolerably adverse circumstances interfere, praise almost seems to be inner health made audible. (“A Word About Praising”)
“The Letter to Diognetus”
On Inauguration Day 2017 I decided to sit down and try rephrasing ch. 5 of The Letter to Diognetus
(c. A.D. 130), seeking wisdom for these times
WHAT CHRIST-FOLLOWERS ARE LIKE
You can’t tell these Christ-followers by which country they’re from, or what language they speak, or by their manners and customs. They don’t live in particular cities apart from other people, or speak a certain way, or have something obvious about them you notice right off. And they’re not about some human-devised philosophy, set of rules, or self-help system.
They live in all different cities and towns; and in urban, suburban, and rural settings–just wherever the vicissitudes of life have brought them. And wherever they are they pretty much live like the other people there: more or less the same clothes, food, and everyday things like that.
And yet there is something clearly different about them. They live wherever they live but somehow also seem to belong to somewhere else. They’re good citizens and neighbors and benefit from the common good, but they don’t always insist on their rights or demand power and privilege.
They can be at home anywhere in the world and yet are not truly at home even where they were born and raised.
They marry as usual and raise families like everyone else. But they keep even their unwanted newborns. They all eat together a lot but don’t sleep around. They enjoy the good pleasures of life but don’t let those pleasures control them. They live out their days on earth but are citizens of heaven. They’re law-abiding but also go the extra mile and do more than what’s required.
They pretty much love everyone equally even though all kinds of people hate them. They’re the kind of people that don’t get famous and that others write off. They’re poor but those who spend time with them come away richer. Materially they don’t seem to have a lot, yet they seem full and content. They get bad-mouthed but this only speaks well of them. They get blamed for things but in the end are blameless. When people curse at them they respond with kind words.
They do good works but get repaid with mistreatment. People with their same ancestry shun them as outsiders. People from the majority culture give them a hard time. But if you ask any of these people why the hate, there isn’t anything they can actually point to.
Russell Yee 