A sampling of quotes that have inspired, instructed, and convicted me. Be sure to watch for new additions!
I will not take perfection or completion as my goal, for to do so would be to invite despair; but I will count my day well lived when I have labored in love, even though I have not finished my tasks and will begin them all again on the morrow.
LINDSEY BRIGHAM-KNOTT
A full life is what gives traction to all the claims made in old books….Fairy tales only make sense to kids who play in the dirt.
JOSH GIBBS
“Education at every level reflects our primary assumptions about man….In fact, whether he wishes to or not, he presupposes an order of human values; his understanding of the nature and proper end of man determines the purposes and tasks that he assigns to education.”
DAVID HICKS, PROLOGUE TO “NORMS & NOBILITY”
“Peace is the tranquility of order.”
ST. AUGUSTINE VIA DR. JOHN CUDDEBACK
Grant me, O Lord my God, a mind to know you, a heart to seek you, wisdom to find you, conduct pleasing to you, faithful perseverance in waiting for you, and a hope of finally embracing you. Amen.
St. thomas Aquinas
“In the Gospel, ‘myth becomes fact’ when the divine enters into history.”
C.S. LEWIS VIA CARLA GALDO
“However strange it may well seem, to do one’s duty will make any one conceited who only does it sometimes….What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets? A thief who was trying to reform would. To be conceited of doing one’s duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it . . .
Until our duty becomes to us as common as breathing, we are poor creatures.“
GEORGE MACDONALD VIA LINDSEY BRIGHAM-KNOTT
“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”
G.K. CHESTERTON, “ORTHODOXY”
“Without discernment, a desire for a better way — as honorable as it may seem — can lead us down dark paths. The Enlightenment may have delivered us from religious wars, but it also led directly to the French Revolution. Good intentions, indeed, pave roads, but not all roads are good.”
CHRIS SWANSON
“…the best labor of each day is simply that which is done every day.”
LINDSEY BRIGHAM-KNOTT
“The tired objection that the classical writers are not men of ‘color’ implies the very illiberal principle that only men of one color can understand men of the same color. On these premises, all men are evidently not created equal. They are created so differently that they cannot understand each other….
We read Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, because they deal with truths necessary to become human beings who understand what our existence is for, whatever be our color or era. We can choose not to know what is, but it is not a virtue. It is indeed an illiberal education that closes us off from what we are.“
FR. JAMES V. SCHALL