I believe: stop my not believing. Sc. 54, Mark 9:24
One must first believe before one’s unbelief is helped.
This man, being but a beginner in believing, prayed the Savior to add to his virtue what was wanting. Chrysostom
I would like to call out to everyone who is riding on this train: “Jump out before the train reaches its destination, even if it costs you your life!” —Franz Jägerstätter
Punishment is the inevitable consequence of man’s attempt to regulate life and society on a system that runs counter to the facts of his own nature. Dorothy L. Sayers
Get out of my way, Satan, you are a stone in my path. You speak for men and not God. Sc. 52, Matthew 16:23, Mark 8:33
Hurtful.
Is being hurt by the truth a problem? —Fr. Gerald E. Murray, ‘The Synodal Church of ”Me, Myself, and I”'
A baby is delivered, not created, at birth.
One should not imagine that the Apostles said the Our Father as they walked with Jesus; nor will we say the Our Father in heaven. If you are with Jesus, be with Jesus. If you are with the Father, be with the Father.
The First Amendment does not restrict religion. The First Amendment restricts government.
After they die, many people are going to places they don’t believe in.
Jacques Barzun, “Baseball’s Best Cultural Critic”, Turns His Back on the Game, by Douglas McDaniel
But: “As this book neared completion, Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and MIke Stadler’s Psychology of Baseball figured among his current reading. —Michael Murray, Jacques Barzun, 2011.
One sometimes has doubts about the small print added to the Gospels.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 128 Civics Questions and Answers (2020 version)
The term is not a slur; it is a technical label. —Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence
Hirschman on the possibility of and search for genuine novelty.
The possibility of encountering genuine novelty can never be ruled out – this is indeed one of the principal lessons of the past itself. And there is a special justification for the direct search for novelty, creativity, and uniqueness: without these attributes change, at least large-scale social change, may not be possible at all. For, in the first place, the powerful social forces opposed to change will be quite proficient at blocking off those paths of change that have already been trod. Secondly, revolutionaries or radical reformers are unlikely to generate the extraordinary social energy they need to achieve change unless they are exhilaratingly conscious of writing an entirely new page of human history. —Albert O. Hirschman
“J’ay veu en mon temps cent artisans, cent laboureurs, plus sages et plus heureux que des Recteurs de l’Universite.” (I have seen in my time hundreds of artisans and laborers, wiser and happier than university presidents.) —Montaigne, quoted by Aldous Huxley, quoted by IWP Books
Temptations perpetually surround us. —Samuel Johnson, quoted by Aldous Huxley, quoted by IWP Books
The temperamental conservative is a type vulnerable to ridicule, yet not more innately ridiculous than his neighbours. —Agnes Repplier, quoted in Patrick Kurp, "‘Make the Best of a Bad Job’"