Daniel

“Your detractors provide valuable lessons. Ask yourself if their criticisms are correct. If so, then improve yourself, and be grateful for their guidance. If, on the other hand, their criticisms are misguided, then recognize that their error is nothing to you. Let them persist in their misperceptions if they must. Should they change their minds and come to respect you, recognize that this is equally insignificant. Perhaps the praise will prove as well or ill-placed as the criticism. Perhaps both assessments will prove inapt and inaccurate. What of it? The wind blows, the people form beliefs, the river flows, and, in the end, the world swallows it all.”
― William Ferraiolo, Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure: Stoic Exercise for Mental Fitness

“According to God’s book, there is “a time to weep and a time to laugh” (Ecclesiastes 3:4). The surest sign that our culture is in deep doo-doo is that we are increasingly sure that this is a time to weep and increasingly doubtful that it is a time to laugh.”
― Peter Kreeft, Ha!: A Christian Philosophy of Humor

“It is said that Christianity, if it is to survive, must face the modern world, must come to terms with the way things are in the sense of the current drift of things. It is just the other way around: If we are to survive, we must face Christianity. The strongest reactionary force impeding progress is the cult of progress itself, which, cutting us off from our roots, makes growth impossible and choice unnecessary. We expire in the lazy, utterly helpless drift, the spongy warmth of an absolute uncertainty. Where nothing is ever true, or right or wrong, there are no problems; where life is meaningless we are free from responsibility, the way a slave or scavenger is free. Futility breeds carelessness, against which stands the stark alternative: against the radical uncertainty by which modern man has lived – as in a game of Russian roulette, stifled in the careless “now” between the click and the explosion, living by the dull grace of empty chambers – the risk of certainty. —John Senior, Ph.D.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“Hold sacred your capacity for understanding. For in it is all, that our ruling principle won’t allow anything to enter that is either inconsistent with nature or with the constitution of a logical creature. It’s what demands due diligence, care for others, and obedience to God.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living