“Christmas can be commercial and tacky – after all, graduations, weddings and funerals are often commercial and tacky – but it should never be sentimental. Sentimentality is love without sacrifice. The sentimental man sends his wife flowers but never helps with the dishes.”
Fr. Raymond J. DeSouza in National Post Dec. 24, 2002
“Things do come to those who wait, but only things left over from those who hustle.”
Not Abraham Lincoln, despite countless internet attributions. (And to be blunt, it doesn’t sound like him either, in tone or content.) It’s still a good line. But not his.
“It is a pressing problem for a credible theology, second only to the problem of suffering, to give some satisfactory account of why the diversity of religious affirmations should not lead us to the conclusion that they are merely the expression of culturally determined opinions. Kenneth Cragg reminds us that even in the seventeenth century John Bunyan felt the difficulty. In Grace Abounding he wrote, ‘Everyone doth think his own religion rightest, both Jews and Moors and Pagans: and how if our faith, and Christ, and scriptures, should be but a think so too?’ Of course, there is unquestionably a degree of cultural determination in our actual religious beliefs. If I had grown up in Saudi Arabia, rather than in England, it would be foolish to deny that the chances are I would be a Muslim. But the chances are also that I would not have spent most of my life as a theoretical physicist, but that does not mean that science is simply a cultural artefact. We must not commit the genetic fallacy of supposing that origin explains away the content of belief.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“And what, philosophically, is the difference between those physically alive, but sleepwalking through their daily existence and those physically dead but alive in the being of others?”
A writer whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine July 1987
In my latest Epoch Times column I say inflation isn’t a conspiracy run out of Davos and the conservatives don’t have a hidden agenda and climate skeptics aren’t in the pay of Big Oil and nobody can be bothered plotting against you nor could they if they tried because the people in power are just as muddled as they appear to be.
“that cruelty which is the last defense of a horribly pained sensitivity...”
My source for this in my notes is “A Common Reader catalogue # 14, 8/88” and it wouldn’t be fair to ask you what it means but sadly it wouldn’t be productive to ask me either
“The world is filled with willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.”
Widely attributed to Robert Frost online, but I haven’t seen any actual specific place he supposedly said or wrote it
“All habits are bad habits.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Joseph Connors in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 # 8 (July-August 1999)