Five Quotes, vol. xvii

 

Mural in Oxfam, Deal, England

I have been fully immersed in managing school this week, and my reading life reflects that.  Some of my quotes come from the kids' reading for school with Wodehouse for a little levity and a rather long passage from Dickens that felt very prescient to the way so many people--with varied and opposing opinions--feel pressured to do good these days.  Even when human nature is bad, I am oddly comforted in its sameness through the centuries.  We are capable of great good and great evil, and it has always been thus.  And thus I'll end with some Thomas Aquinas I read alongside E this week that struck me as the most challenging belief for people through the ages, yet if we believe that God planned for the murder of His own son to pay for all our badness, then we know this must be true.

"Captain Kelly pulled a chair back and lowered himself into it with a tight-trousered man's slow caution."

- Big Money, P.G. Wodehouse

"God is constantly changing the Earth He made.  He carves rocky precipices with wind, pounds beaches with ocean waves, and softens soil with showers."

- Creation to Cathedrals, Ray and Charlene Notgrass

"...his philanthropy was of that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it and animosity was hard to determine.  You were to abolish military force, but you were first to bring all commanding officers who had done their duty, to trial by court-martial for that offense, and shoot them.  You were to abolish war, but were to make converts by making war upon them, and charging them with loving war as the apple of their eye.  You were to have no capital punishment, but were first to sweep off the face of the earth all legislators, jurists, and judges, who were of the contrary opinion.  You were to have universal concord, and were to get it by eliminating all the people who wouldn't, or conscientiously couldn't, be concordant.  You were to love your brother as yourself, but after an indefinite interval of maligning him (very much as if you hated him), and calling him all manner of names.  Above all things, you were to do nothing in private, or on your own account.  You were to go to the offices of the Haven of Philanthropy, and put your name down as a Member and a Professing Philanthropist.  Then, you were to pay up your subscription, get your card of membership and your riband and medal, and were evermore to live upon a platform, and evermore to say what Mr. Honeythunder said...in short, the baseness of all those who do not belong to it, and pledges itself to make as many obnoxious statements as possible about them, without being at all particular as to facts."

- The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Charles Dickens

"...there must exist something the existence of which is necessary."

- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

"This is part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good."

- Thomas Aquinas