Let’s think of reverence and awe, as presence in and openness to the world. The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down. Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul. All of a sudden everything seemed to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment. This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of—forgive me—wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break into our small,…
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Sir Richard Livingstone on Chaos or Cosmos
We have lost—at any rate in the post-primary school—our grip on education. It has become a mass of uncoordinated subjects, a chaos instead of a cosmos. Its dominating idea, so far as it has one, is to provide the equipment of knowledge which an intelligent man should possess. So it tends to become a collection of isolated subjects—a world of planets, as the Greeks perceived planets, stars wandering each on its irregular way, occasionally dashing into each other. For this we need to substitute a solar system whose ruling principle is the making of human beings.
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Benjamin Braddock on the Rules of the Game
God holds back those who want to go forward on their own strength and who want to justify their flesh by their own zeal. He holds back those who would like to bring all their old nature with them into the kingdom of God and to be praised because they are the driving force, because they are the people who advanced the cause. God holds back all these souls! He strikes them down! Anyone who does not want to be held back by God must find the path that leads downward: the path upon which we become free of ourselves; the path upon which we must die, the path upon…
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Christof Friedrich Blumhardt on the Failure of Strength and Zeal
God holds back those who want to go forward on their own strength and who want to justify their flesh by their own zeal. He holds back those who would like to bring all their old nature with them into the kingdom of God and to be praised because they are the driving force, because they are the people who advanced the cause. God holds back all these souls! He strikes them down! Anyone who does not want to be held back by God must find the path that leads downward: the path upon which we become free of ourselves; the path upon which we must die, the path upon…
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Dickens on What Everybody Says
Everybody is, often, as likely to be wrong as right. In the general experience, everybody has been wrong so often, and it has taken, in most instances, such a weary while to find out how wrong, that the authority is proved to be fallible. Everybody may sometimes be right; “but that’s no rule,” as the ghost of Giles Scroggins says in the ballad.