Chesterton: Joy

Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live.

Orthodoxy p159)

Yancey: self righteous & grace

God's grace, the only solution to death and evil, comes free of charge, apart from law, apart from any human efforts toward self-improvement. For a free gift, we need only hold out open, needy hands—the most difficult gesture of all for a self-righteously evil person.

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/may/32.80.html?start=2

Piper: knowing what counts

You don't have to know a lot of things for your life to make a lasting difference in the world. But you do have to know the few great things that matter, perhaps just one, and then be willing to live for them and die for them. The people that make a durable difference in the world are not people who have mastered many things, but have been mastered by one great thing. If you want your life to count, if you want the ripple effects of the pebbles you drop to become waves that reach the ends of the earth and roll on into eternity, you don't need to have a high IQ. You don't have to have good looks or riches or come from a fine family or a fine school. Instead you have to know a few great, majestic, unchanging, obvious, simple, glorious things - or one great all-embracing thing - and be set on fire by them.

John Piper, Don't Waste Your Life, p44.

CSL: literary gossip

If I had some rare information about the private life of Shakespeare or Dante I’d throw it in the fire, tell no one, and re-read their works. All this biographical interest is only a device for indulging in gossip as an excuse for not reading what the chaps say.

Letter dated Jan 19, 1948

Baker: what is man?

"What is man? What am I? Why would the creator of the universe care about us, about me?"

David's question, so famously asked in Psalm 8, has been ringing in every human soul ever since we hid in the bushes from the sound of God's approach. We may have the option of ignoring the question's answer, but we do not have the ability not to ask it.

Doug P Baker, Covenant and Community, p1.

Bunny wunny

I was sitting on my front porch watching a rabbit hop across a field, towards the road and the field beyond. As the rabbit was just beginning to cross the road, a car came by hit it, knocking it flying over the car and onto the pavement.

The driver slammed on the breaks, jumped out of the car and ran back to examine the rabbit. Then, she went back to the car, opened the trunk and got out an aerosol can. She returned to the rabbit, used the can; and to my surprise the rabbit revived. It got up, hopped a few steps towards the field, turned and gestured to the woman. It then hopped a few more steps into the field, turned and gestured, and continued on across the field and out of sight.

At this, I came over and questioned the driver about the contents of the aerosol, how it revived the rabbit and caused such odd behavior.

"Well," she said, "It's just hare restorer with permanent wave."

(Sorry, I couldn't resist)

http://merecomments.typepad.com/merecomments/2008/05/the-tragic-deat.html

Eliot: perfect systems

Read part of this quotation in an article questioning what would happen if all politicians and laws were just right - would we have the life we want?

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is shall shadow
The man that pretends to be.


TS Eliot

Hope: US/UK TV

The British people generally seem to disdain commercialism. (They've been brainwashed for years by the non-commercial BBC.) Their attitude is mostly evident in the soft-sell on their commercial television. They do a lovely little domestic scene, and hidden somewhere in it is the product. They rarely refer to it directly...

...the big difference in those days was that in England the government subsidized TV, in America we work on TV so we can subsidize the government.

Bob Hope, I Owe Russia $1200 (1963), p 27