This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Those who complain that they make no progress in the life of prayer because they cannot meditate should examine, not their capacity for meditation, but their capacity for suffering and love. For there is a hard and costly element, a deep seriousness, a crucial choice, in all genuine religion.
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The offertory is the first essential action of the Liturgy, because in it we make the costly and solemn oblation, under tokens, of our very selves and all our substance; that they may be transformed, quickened, and devoted to the interests of God.
The strikes hurt the daily lives of the citizens badly, and damage public order... We would hope that all is being done to solve the problems.
I come in the little things, Saith the Lord: Not borne on morning wings of majesty, but I have set my feet amidst the delicate and bladed wheat That springs triumphant in the furrowed sod. There do I dwell, in weakness and in power; not broken or divided, saith our God! In your strait garden plot I come to flowers about your porch my vine, meek, fruitful, doth entwine; waits, at the threshold, Love's appointed hour. I come in the little things, saith the Lord: Yea! On the glancing wings of eager birds, the softly pattering feet of furred and gentle beasts, I come to meet Your hear and wayward heart. In brown bright eyes that peep from out the brake, I stand confest. On every nest where feathery patience is content to brood and leaves her pleasure for the high emprize of motherhood -- There doth My Godhead rest. I come in the little things, Saith the Lord.
You can also offer your prayers, obedience, and endurance of dryness to Our Lord, for the good of other souls, and then you have practiced intercession. Never mind if it all seems for the time very second-hand. The less you get out of it, the nearer it approaches to being something worth offering; and the humiliation of not being able to feel as devout as we want to be, is excellent for most of us. Use vocal prayer... very slowly, trying to realize the meaning with which it is charged and remember that... you are only a unit in the Chorus of the Church, so that the others will make good the shortcomings you cannot help.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
I've always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can't shut myself out from His mercy. ... Or it may be a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won't quite despair of me in the end.
There is no need for peculiar conditions in order to grow in the spiritual life, for the pressure of God's Spirit is present everywhere and at all times. Our environment itself -- our home and our job -- is the medium through which we experience His molding action and His besetting loveÂ… And this quality of quietness, ordinariness, simplicity, with which the saving action of God enters history, endures from the beginning to the end.
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Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
The next four weeks of solitary confinement were among the happiest of Paul's life...It was so exhilarating, he found, never to have to make any decision on any subject, to be wholly relieved from the smallest consideration of time, meas, or clothes, to have no anxiety ever about what kind of impression he was making; in fact, to be free.
Everett Dirksen, fully Everett McKinley Dirksen
Stronger than all the armies is an idea thatÂ’s time has comeÂ… The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education, and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here!
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one's youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one's stature on the edge of the door.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of utterance.
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Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Your colleague, Captain Grimes, has been convicted before me on evidence that leaves no possibility of his innocence - of a crime (I might almost call it a course of action) which I can neither understand nor excuse. I dare say I need not particularize.
Evelyn Waugh, fully Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh
Other nations use "force"; we Britons alone use "Might.
The Lord raised up the Founding Fathers. He it was who established the Constitution of this land — the greatest document of freedom ever written. This God-inspired Constitution is not outmoded. It is not an outdated “agrarian document” as some of our would-be statesmen, socialists, and fellow travelers of the godless conspiracy would have us believe. It was the Lord God who established the foundation of this nation; and woe be unto those — members of the Supreme Court and others — who would weaken this foundation.