At some thoughts one stands perplexed, especially at the sight of men's sin, and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that once for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.
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Blaise Pascal on the Past, the Future, and the Present
“We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.”
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Miami Miami
You are sitting on the couch watching football some Saturday afternoon. Maybe it’s halftime of your home state's annual Civil War game. Maybe two top ten teams are warming up for kickoff. Or you are just flipping channels looking for a close contest. But as score updates scroll along the bottom of the screen, one stands out: Miami University. "Wait, Miami University of … Ohio? Why is there a Miami University in the State of Ohio? Isn’t Miami in Florida?"
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T.S. Eliot on Asphalt and Golf Balls
“Here were decent godless people: / Their only monument the asphalt road / And a thousand lost golf balls.”
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Sir Richard Livingstone on Education for a World Adrift
Their education did little to help them. It was like a half-assembled motorcar; most of the parts were there, but they were not put together. Reformers wished to base it on science and technology, or on sociology and economics, whose importance they saw; if they had had their way, they would have produced a good chassis, but overlooked the need of an engine not to speak of a driver who knew where to go. The real problem lay deeper than science or sociology or politics: it was spiritual.
