The Fair Graduate

"Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last."

-- John Ruskin

"Obedience is the best form of poverty."

-- Michael O'Brien, Father Elijah

In Honour of the Anniversary of His Death

"It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, making the world more human and more fraternal."

-- Blessed John Paul II

Here lived a great person!

"What I'm saying to you this morning, my friends, even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.'"

-- Martin Luther King

I've always loved this quote, although I give the credit to a friend of mine who sent this to me in an email this morning. I've always thought this can be attributed to anything we do in life: that 20 page paper due next week, the piles of laundry that need to be washed and dried and folded and put away, the mountains of housework that never seem to end (allusion that mothers of families will especially understand), homework that never ends (even if you finish it, you'll end up with more!), your part-time (or full-time job), your spiritual life - all these things we can do well if we put our hearts into it. "Here lived a great (fill in position/job here) who did his/her job well!" 

Here! Here!

A conversation about trees

"What times are these, where

A conversation about trees is almost a crime

Because it contains silence about so many atrocities."

-- Bertolt Brecht,

Used by Carole Fink in "Jews in Contemporary Europe"

Memory

"If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out."

-- Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

The Beauty of Human Nature

"I say we need to discover this second wing [responsibility], and how to use the first [our freedom], in order to be content as human beings. To discover the beauty in our nature…unique in each individual, but created whole and beautiful. Then our souls will soar effortlessly above the sufferings and harshness of our material world. Then our souls will rest close to the heart of God, Who made us to soar above the peaks of the mountains and the crests of the clouds, in the heights of the sky. It is then that we will discover what it means to be fully human, and to rejoice in the beauty of human nature."

-- "My Soul Cries Out With Longing: Philosophical Reflection on Beauty" in The Imaginative Conservative