It is the duty of a rational man to do his utmost to uncover the stage of humanity he stands upon.
A broken handle cannot open a door.
The blessed are awfully cognizant of their agency, while the wretched are awfully cognizant of its lack.
Modernity offers plenty for the grateful.
Balmy late summer augurs well for the winter.
Great claims require either inordinate proofs or none at all.
One feels great sympathy for another whose only source of joy seems to be their realization of how unhappy they have been all their life — may the Lord cure all the miserable amongst us who are in the grip of unrelenting ingratitude — and all praise is to the One who has granted this particular wretch a sense of deep joy amidst the beleaguered moments of life.
Proper reflection obviates the need for low-resolution consolation, for a moment that is wholly in concert with the intellect as one is sat on a curved rock by the purling stream is quite sufficient, rather than endless dialectical disputation to absurdity.
The entire point of metaphysics is totality, something the new man cannot reconcile with his infatuation with specification.
Far too many people are ashamed of being unhappy and in that lie the seeds of their misfortune and ingratitude.
It is often said that reason is the distinguishing differentia that constitutes man, the difference, so to speak; but few say that guilt, too, is so very architectonic of man.
The most vicious of the devil’s hooks is not the lay debauchery studded across the land, all that is fairly standard; what is most pernicious of his ploys may very well be a particular hook into the heart, a tear into the substance of the soul itself, a specific bleeding fixation itself, a deadly fixation on any particular thing, an idea or an object; say, a man committed to walk endlessly for miles for no particular reason or for a reason so vacuous to hold no substantive meaning — this may all feel rather innocuous until one realizes the grip of compulsion one is under, and it is clear the Lord does not wish for man any compulsion, and it is also evident that the devil does not bear any particular power within himself to compel, at best he may be said to incite, or suggest, but the gash, in the form of said suggestion, he leaves on the heart has the tendency and natural ability to bleed unless it is put right again; it is the secondary causality of evil that one must be wary of, the wound that has concomitants instantiated as vacuous action, immured thought.
If one could see the sky, one would surely cease to doubt the truth of the whole.
Seneca, Hecatonis sententiam referens, ait: “desines timere, si sperare desieris.”
Divinity is often so absurdly crushing that man, in flashes of understanding, is overwhelmed by the thought of its very existence.
May the mighty Lord bless the master, Schubert, who has tremendously raised the spirits of many a wretch.
This is now the age of particulars; man drowned in the age of universals.
The warm and humid summer air is good for morale, and in any case, it gives one the excuse to admire the fan, a glorious invention of modernity, a swiveling distributor of air.
Writing invites a particular sort of dourness that speech often precludes; the former encourages canalization while the latter provokes an expansion into air itself.
There is, it is to be said, an awfully clear difference between the inversion of the Devil and that of divinity; whereas the former seeks inversion qua debasement, the latter seeks inversion as revelation.