If you do not answer the noise and urgency of your gifts they will turn on you. Or drag you down with their immense sadness at being abandoned.
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Hope…
Hope, it is the quintessential human delusion, simultaneously the source of your greatest strength and your greatest weakness.
[Ironically, it is the Architect who is delusional about hope.] <link>
He who avoids prayer is avoiding everything that is good.
Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.
Every instant of our lives is essentially irreplaceable: you must know this in order to concentrate on life.
It is not that we have so little time, but that we have wasted so much of it.
A key has no logic to its shape. Its logic is: it turns the lock.
Only a heart, only a soul, only one who loves hears.
The heart wants to hear, see, and know.
The human heart seeks to engage especially in three activities. It wants to hear and be heard, it wants to see and be seen, and it wants to know and be known.
The present is very precious; these are the days of salvation; now is the acceptable time.
Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.
Time is the unfolding of truth that already is,
the unveiling of beauty that is yet to be.
To find something that is given, one must first be looking for it. To understand an answer, one must first have asked the question, otherwise the explanation will sound like a foreign tongue, or like empty silence.
Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.
Intrusions of grace…
Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.
A student is not a container you have to fill but a torch you have to light up.
Change breaks the brittle.
I dare you to see beauty. And once you see it, it overwhelms you. It’s extraordinary.
There is only one perfect road and that road is ahead of you, always ahead of you.
Because people don’t like change. But make the change happen fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.
You will find the glory of charity more than a match for the parade of power.
I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat”—though it contains some samples or glimpses of final victory.
The Devil hisself can, after all, hardly be an atheist. As the Father of Lies, he preaches atheism, but doesn’t believe what he is preaching. Like a General Secretary of the Communist Party, he is using it to sucker the Proletariat.
No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crisis of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid this folly and live his life in order.
Souls are like bathroom floors; it’s not until you get down on your knees that you see how badly they need a cleaning.
Tyranny for Their Own Good
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Storytelling is joke telling. It’s knowing your punchline, your ending. Knowing that everything you’re saying from the first sentence to the last is leading to a singular goal and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understanding of who we are as human beings.
Frankly there isn’t anyone you couldn’t learn to love once you’ve heard their story.
Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty.
The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.
Design is the rendering of intent.
In matters of style, swim with the current;
In matters of principle, stand like a rock.
Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable, it is true.
Whither the Idea of God?
The answer, of course, is that the idea of God has no particular source, no genesis one could trace back to the point of origin. Anymore than, say, the idea of geometry, or music, or speech, the movements and rhythms of which are simply of a piece with being human, belonging therefore to the deepest operations of head and heart. And because the idea of God is both real and unique, abiding in both mind and will from the beginning, there is nothing in science or history or ideology that could possibly have put it there. Secularism can no more generate this light than it can succeed in putting it out. It was from the beginning and will always be simply there. Like a sudden flash point of eternity into time, whose unforeseen illuminations have come to light up the night sky of our lives with the absolute certainty of hope. Only God can account for the idea of God.
The world is full of people who are waiting for someone to come along and motivate them to be the kind of people they wish they could be. These people are waiting for a bus on a street where no buses pass.
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
Repetition is the death of magic
You can’t really blame people for preferring more of what they already know and like. The trade-off, of course, is that predictability is boring. Repetition is the death of magic.
Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of men.
Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.
Sometimes the sacrifice you want to make for God is not the one being asked.
If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy.
Draw persons to God by your words, by your example, and by the works of Mercy.
The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed—
It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.
Searching subset of Hope?
To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be on to something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.
The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting for you.
The world is more like a poem than a syllogism.
What a crime it is for a man to grow old without having seen the strength and beauty of which his body is capable.
Center of the Universe
Someday when scientists discover the center of the universe, a lot of people will be unhappy to find out it’s not them.
What God Says from The Cross
Do you think I care for you so little that betraying me would make a difference?
— Doctor Who, episode “Dark Water” (Season 8) <link>
Christmas is not an event within history but is rather the invasion of time by eternity.
At the head of all understanding is realizing what is and what cannot be and the consoling of what is not in our power to change.