Classic and contemporary excerpts.
Others In Me
A hundred times a day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depends on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the measure as I have received and am still receiving.
—Albert Einstein
quoted in Family Concern
Sex And Happiness
Perhaps one of the most persistent and obviously invalid assumptions of our civilization is that sexual behavior brings happiness. The media trumpet the message, “Sex brings happiness.” If this were true, we would indeed live in an earthly paradise, and the world would be “Happy Valley.”
I suppose that half the people you meet on a bus, or in a shopping center, or even at church on Sunday have had some genital sexual experience during the preceding few days. It is the observation of an old celibate from way back that they are not all so very happy. If sex brought happiness, the world would shine like the sun, at least half the time. Celibates need not try to convince themselves that chaste celibacy is the road to earthly bliss, but on the other hand they need not feel deprived of the key to happiness. If there is a single key to contentment, it cannot be sexual experience.
—Benedict J. Groeschel,
O.F.M. Cap.
The Courage to Be Chaste
Doubt Is Natural …
We are born questioners. Look at the wonderment of a little child in its eyes before it can speak. The child’s great word when it begins to speak is why. Every child is full of every kind of question, about every kind of thing that moves, and shines, and changes, in the little world in which it lives. That is the incipient doubt in the nature of man. Respect doubt for its origin. It is an inevitable thing. It is not a thing to be crushed. It is a part of man as God made him.… Doubt is the prelude of knowledge.
—Henry Drummond
from Listening to the Giants
… But Use It
Your doubt can become a good quality if you train it.… Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrassed, perhaps also protesting. But don’t give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers—perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building in your life.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet
Right Gone Wrong
There are areas in our lives where in our effort to be right we may go wrong, so wrong as to lead to spiritual deformity. To be specific let me name a few:
1. When in our determination to be bold we become brazen.
2. When in our desire to be frank we become rude.
3. When in our effort to be watchful we become suspicious.
4. When we seek to be serious and become somber.
5. When we mean to be conscientious and become overscrupulous.
—A. W. Tozer
from That Incredible Christian
Love A Sinner?
I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.
For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.
—C. S. Lewis
Mere Christianity
Our Circuitous World View
The production of art and entertainment for commercial reasons is an old story; what may be new is the elevation of this practice into a principle, and the establishment of a system based on it.…
In classical political theory, the marketplace was a forum in which anyone who had anything on his mind could express it. According to this theory, the chain of events by which the public found out about the world began with the individual person looking out upon the world and reflecting on what he saw; then, perhaps after much labor, the person brought the product of his thought to the marketplace, there to be displayed with the work of others; and then the public picked and chose what it liked. But in the new system the ends of the chain have been joined to form a closed loop. The individual, instead of looking out upon the world, looks out upon public opinion, trying to find out what the public would like to hear. Then he tries his best to duplicate that, and brings his finished product into a marketplace in which others are competing to do the same. The public, turning to our culture to find out about the world, discovers there nothing but its own reflection. The unexamined world, meanwhile, drifts blind into the future.
—Talk of the Town
The New Yorker
