Incidentally #5
A man is never lonely when eating spaghetti.
—unknown
The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.
—G. K. Chesterton
The wonder that Almighty God can endure so far to leave the very making of an immortal being in the hands of human parents is only matched by the wonder that human parents can accept this divine trust with hardly a thought of its significance.
—Charlotte Mason
If I find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy, I can only conclude that I was not made for here.
—C. S. Lewis
[T]here’s no such things as an open mind, and that’s a good thing. If you had an open mind, a mind not structured by presuppositions, it would have the characteristics of a sieve. Everything would just fall right through. So I am an advocate of close-mindedness.
—Stanley Fish
I praise the Frenchman; his remark was shrewd,—
“How sweet, how passing sweet is solitude.”
But grant me still a friend in my retreat,
Whom I may whisper—Solitude is sweet.
—William Cowper
The main field of creativity in our day should be human relationships.
—Fritz Kunkel
One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for us, is the gardener’s own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.
—Wendell Berry
The highest reward for a man’s toil is not what he gets for it, but what he becomes by it.
—John Ruskin
That thing which I understand by real art is the expression of man of his pleasure in labour. I do not believe he can be happy in his labour without expressing that happiness, and especially this is so when he is at work at anything in which he specially excels.
—William Morris
I have been through some really terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
—Mark Twain
But Thou art making me, I thank Thee, sire.
What Thou hast done and doest Thou knowes’t well.
And I will help Thee; gently in Thy fire
I will lie burning; on thy potter’s wheel
I will whirl patient, though my brain should reel.
Thy grace shall be enough to quell,
And growing strength perfect through weakness dire.
—George MacDonald
Sunday is the golden clasp that binds the volume of the week.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
In the early days of the republic, equality meant equality before God... [Following the Civil War] equality came more and more to be interpreted as equality of opportunity... A very different meaning of equality has emerged in the United States in recent decades— equality of outcome.
—Milton Friedman
Modesty is the citadel of beauty and virtue.
—Demades
God never goes to the lazy or the idle when He needs men for His service. Moses was busy with his flock at Horeb. Gideon was threshing wheat by the winepress. Saul was searching for his father’s donkeys. Elisha was plowing with his oxen. Nehemiah was bearing the king’s wine cup. Amos was following the clock. Peter and Andrew were casting a net. James and John were mending their nets. Matthew was collecting customs. Saul was persecuting friends of Jesus.
—unknown
Love doesn’t just sit there like a stone. It has to be made, like bread.
—Ursula K. LeGuin
Rum idea this is, that tidiness is a timid, quiet sort of thing; why tidiness is a toil for giants. You can’t tidy anything without untidying yourself; just look at my trousers. Don’t you know that? Haven’t you ever had a spring cleaning?
—G. K Chesterton, Manalive
Take your needle, my child, and work at our pattern—it will come out a rose by and by. Life is like that—one stitch at a time, taken patiently...
—Oliver Wendell Holmes
Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.
—Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth: A Novel
Photograph: A cousin and I enjoy a spaghetti dinner during a family reunion. August 2010. I hate eating spaghetti in front of people, so the first quote here is a personal favorite, often repeated as I try to slurp the last inches of pasta or catch drips of sauce in a napkin perpetually poised for action.
Photograph © 2011.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011