Saturday ~ August 4, 2018

You re all worked up chasing after this and trying to avoid that. These things are not coming to you, so to speak, but you are going to them. Stop desiring the one and fearing the other, and they will stay where they are, and you will not be pursuing or fleeing them.

(Marcus Aurelius, 121 0 180)

Friday ~ August 3, 2018

Life demands that duality in men and women be freed to function, released from hate or guilt. All we derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion, subjection excludes mutuality... We need each other's qualities if we are ever to understand each other in love and life. The beautiful difference of our biological cells will not diminish through this mutual fusion. It should indeed flower, expand the mind as well as the flesh. When women can cherish the vulnerability of men as much as men can exult in the strength of a women, a new breed could lift a ruinous yoke from both. We could both breathe free.


(Marya Mannes, 1904 - 1990)

Thursday ~ August 2, 2018

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment.
We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of the world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

(Jack Gilbert, 1925 - 2012)

Wednesday ~ August 1, 2018

Idolatry is the practice of ascribing absolute value to things of relative worth. Under certain circumstances money, patriotism, sexual freedom, moral principles, family loyalty, physical health, social or intellectual preeminence, and so on are fine things to have around, but to make them the standard by which all other values are measured, to make them your masters, to look to them to justify your life and save your soul is sheerest folly. They just aren't up to it.


(Frederick Buechner, b. 1926 -  )

Tuesday ~ July 31, 2018

Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their body's force,
Some in their garments though new-fangled ill;
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse;
And every humour hath its adjunct pleasure,
Wherein it finds a joy above the rest:
But these particulars are not my measure,
All these I better in one general best.

(Willian Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616)

Monday ~ July 30, 2018

Endurance can be a harsh and bitter root in one's life, bearing poisonous and gloomy fruit, destroying of our lives. Endurance is only the beginning. There must be acceptance.

(Pearl S. Buck, 1892 - 973)

Sunday ~ July 29,2018

Do not depend on the hope of results... You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself... You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people... In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

(Thomas Merton, 1915 - 1968)