I have had occasion to meet with, in convents for instance, literally saintly examples of practical charity, they have generally had the brisk, decided, undisturbed and slightly brutal air of a busy surgeon, the face in which one can discern no commi...
Any father…must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best c...
The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the ...
The goal is not to answer these questions. The goal is to be present to them with all that we are. In a way we are following the poet Rilke's advice when he counseled the young artist, "be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to ...
The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money...Those addicted to power, blinded by self-exaltat...
Sometimes when you get older—and I'm not talking about you, I'm talking generally, because everyone ages differently—things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they're a part of your hist...
...Lance is the inevitable product of our celebrity-worshipping culture and the whole money-mad world of sports gone amok. This is the Golden Age of fraud, an era of general willingness to ignore and justify the wrongdoings of the rich and powerful, ...
Before I was married, I didn't consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn't do 'do-it-yourself.' When my father needed to hammer something ...
I grew up in Skaneateles, a small town in New York's Finger Lakes region, where parts of my family have lived for five generations. I can walk the streets there and point out my father's childhood home, the houses my grandfather built, the farm where...
I am not a little bit of many things; but I am the sufficient representation of many things. I am not an incompletion of all these races; but I am a masterpiece of the prolific. I am an entirety, I am not a lack of anything; rather I am a whole of ma...
Christmas was a response of the choice of mankind to take its existence into its own hands and chart its own course, liberally scripting its own ethics, crafting its own moral system, and choosing to believe that it was the creator and therefore mast...
At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and...
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelt...
No es una casualidad que los Sufis piensen que pueden conectarse de forma más constructiva con personas que están bien integradas en el mundo, además de tener objetivos superiores, y que aquellas que adoptan una actitud razonable hacia la vida y l...
Oh! you are a great deal too apt, you know, to like people in general. You never see fault in any body. All the world are good and agreeable in your eyes. I never heard you speak ill of a human being in my life." "I would wish not to be hasty in cens...
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because...
What kind of kids live in Mulhoney, Wisconsin? Would they like me? Would I like them? Have they ever eaten sushi? That's usually how I determine food sophistication. Maybe a personal ad would get the ball rolling: Insightful, hardworking, 16-year-old...
Look at children. Of course they may quarrel, but generally speaking they do not harbor ill feelings as much or as long as adults do. Most adults have the advantage of education over children, but what is the use of an education if they show a big sm...
The actual results of political diplomacy can openly be seen in critical moments. Turkey can insist on leading a very successful foreign policy, however, the acceptance of the fact of the Armenian Genocide by any influential global organization evide...
In what way can we reinforce the faith of our biological family when the culture at large is likely to eat away at that faith? Is our prevailing faith contingent upon seeing certain results of a general, cultural repentance -- lest we doubt the truth...
The overemphasis on standardized tests forces teachers to teach the same restricted, unintuitive curriculum. Longtime educator Brent Evans has said that today's schools are organized as assembly lines, "(running at a set speed) and with each worker (...
