A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
The intellectual as a champion of the masses is a relatively recent phenomenon. Education does not naturally waken in us a concern for the uneducated. The distinction conferred by education is more easily maintained by a sharp separation from those below than be a continued excellence of achievement. When Gandhi was asked by an American clergyman what it was that worried him the most, he replied: "The hardness of heart of the educated."
-Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change
I would say yes to a prayer that reaches out over the companionable objects of our day, yes to prayers for more charity, resilience, good-naturedness, and also a listening kind of praying that is tucked somewhere always in our heart, mystically turning to ever greater reality. What a woeful thing it would be to be denied prayer, to be numbed to its gratitude. We can live without a great deal, but to live entirely without prayer would leave us lesser human beings. Prayer changes our relationships with pretty much everything. It the tribulation of night I turn the wheel of my prayer rope and steer my ship over woeful seas. In the brightness of the longed-for dawn I stare east and am deep-rooted in the wallop of my amazement.
In the end, prayer isn't something we do, it becomes something that we are.
-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us
We have immersed ourselves to a few mega social media platforms. Angertainment is all the rage. If you think doom scrolling, keeping up with Jones’, and entrusting your engrossment to algos designed to keep you in a constant state of anxiety is the path, have at it. Come for the social isolation and stay for the subsequent depression.
-Tony Isola, from this post
Tolstoy searches in science, philosophy, wisdom and reason and finds no answer to convince him that life is worth living. Science answers many questions, but not the one that obsesses him. He sees too that meaning does not lie in something superadded to life: possessions, achievements, honours, awards. Those are externalities, gift-wrapping, not life itself. The answer that eventually came to Tolstoy was religious faith. 'No matter what answers faith may give, its every answer gives to the finite existence of man the sense of the infinite—a sense which is not destroyed by suffering, privation or death.' Faith, he said is a force of life. 'If a man lives, then he must believe in something.' If that something is finite, it will not ultimately satisfy him, since everything finite eventually perishes. The only thing worth believing in is the infinite. And, 'Without faith it is impossible to live.'
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
There is an old saying that goes, "I slept and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke and saw that life was duty." If you really want to be in control of your life, and if you want other people to be able to depend on you and look to you for leadership, you must wake up from the dream that somebody else will handle the responsibility. You must accept the responsibility of leading both yourself and others. No one else can do it for you. And if you develop the skills of a highly effective leader, not one else can do it as well as you, either.
-Jim Rohn, Leading an Inspired Life
The Master was exceedingly gracious to the University dons who visited him, but he would never reply to their questions or be drawn into their theological speculations.
To his disciples, who marveled at this, he said, "Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well—or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?"
-Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom
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