Since it’s summertime and I have a bit more time on my
hands, I’m going to try something new on my blog. I keep a commonplace book
where I write down the most interesting (to me) quotations from the books I’m
reading. And I thought, “Why not share these on the ol’ blog?” So, welcome
to the first Commonplace Wednesday. Each week (maybe) I’m going to post the quotations
that I’ve gathered from the week before. Now usually fiction doesn’t get in because
I generally don’t read fiction with a pen in hand. However, if a particular
piece of proesy is striking enough, I might be forced to run and write it down.
From Boys of Blur by N.D. Wilson
“Mistakes don’t just hang on the wall like ugly pictures.
Mistakes are seeds.” He thumped his chest. “In here. They grow. They take over.
You make a mistake, you gotta make it right. Dig that seed out. Old Wiz used to
say, ‘Fruit rots, wood rots, but lazy-ass boys rot the fastest.’”
From Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
I know what the Greeks do not know, incertitude.
My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century
typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis
Stevenson.
Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that
reason, it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate
all humanity; for that reason, it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single
Jew should be sufficient to save it.
Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map
and the thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights?
Why does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and
Hamlet a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason. These
inversions suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or
spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious. In 1833, Carlyle observed
that the history of the universe is an infinite sacred book that all men write
and read and try to understand, and in which they are also written.
The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors.
His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.
From “The Oracle of the Dog” by G.K. Chesterton
It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose
your common sense and can’t see things as they are.
From “A Misunderstanding about Method” by G.K. Chesterton
I could do a great many things before I came to definitely
anti-social action like robbing a bank or (worse still) working in a bank.
From Our Reasonable Faith by Herman Bavinck
There is room for the grace of God only if the justice of
God is first fully established.
Religion preceded all culture and civilization, and right up
to the present day religion continues to occupy its own position alongside of
science, art, and technology. It cannot be supplanted or compensated for even
by the magnificent results of human effort. Religion supplies a unique need in
man, and its tendency after the fall is always to rescue him from a
particular distress.
For the purpose of that election is not to pick up a few
people at random, to bring them to salvation, and to let them stand loosely
alongside each other as single individuals…In an organic sense it is mankind
that is saved in the church, and in the new heaven and earth the world is
restored.
Then the working days preceded the Sabbath; now the Sabbath
begins the week and hallows all its days.
The believers of the Old Testament are saved in no other way
than we are, nor are we saved in any other way than they.
In the foreground there is always the idea of His kingship.
He is called the Anointed, because He has been anointed as king.
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