The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid.
~Livy~ The Early History of Rome
Cowards die many times before their death; the valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear seeing that death, a necessary end, comes when it will.
~ Julius Caesar~ William Shakespeare
Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people
~ Eleanor Roosevelt
" In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognize, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there ( honeyed and floral) in Francois de Sales; it was there ( grave and homely) in Spenser and Walton; it was there ( grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again with the mild, frighting, Paradisial flavor, in Vaughan and Boehme and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe- Law and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed "Paganism" of the Elizabethans could not keep it out: it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queen and the Arcadia. It was, of course, varied; and yet- after all- so unmistakeably the same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odour which is death to us until we allow it to become life:"
~ C.S. Lewis
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.~ Henry David Thoreau
"It has been well said that the kingdom of God advances through a series of glorious victories cleverly disguised as disasters." ~Douglas Wilson~ Kirk and Covanent
Cultivate your mind by the perusal of those books which instruct as well as they amuse. History, geography, poetry, moral essays, biographies, travels, sermons, and well written religious productions will not fail enlarge your understanding to render you a more agreeable compainion and to exhalt your virtue. ~Patrick Henry
"Don't only practice your art, but force your way into its Secrets..." Ludwig van Beethoven
