Montaigne once wrote, “We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.” That’s because wisdom isn’t a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing what you don’t know and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty, and limitation. (Location 287)
When we think about making a difference or leading a life with purpose, we often think of achieving something external—performing some service that will have an impact on the world, creating a successful company, or doing something for the community. (Location 297)
Adam I achieves success by winning victories over others. But Adam II builds character by winning victories over the weaknesses in himself. (Location 365)
This perspective begins with an awareness that the world existed long before you and will last long after you, and that in the brief span of your life you have been thrown by fate, by history, by chance, by evolution, or by God into a specific place with specific problems and needs. Your job is to figure certain things out: What does this environment need in order to be made whole? What is it that needs repair? What tasks are lying around waiting to be performed? As the novelist Frederick Buechner put it, “At what points do my talents and deep gladness meet the world’s deep need?” (Location 521)
Then it told them that the heroes in this struggle are not the self-aggrandizing souls who chase after glory; they are rather the heroes of renunciation, those who accept some arduous calling. (Location 661)
“Do what nobody else wants to do; go where nobody else wants to go,” the school’s founder, Mary Lyon, implored her students. (Location 666)
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. (Location 996)
The essential drama of life is the drama to construct character, which is an engraved set of disciplined habits, a settled disposition to do good. (Location 1093)
The person involved in the struggle against sin understands that each day is filled with moral occasions. (Location 1141)
Since self-control is a muscle that tires easily, it is much better to avoid temptation in the first place rather than try to resist it once it arises. (Location 1158)
Ida seemed to understand, as her husband did not, that you can’t rely just on self-control, habit, work, and self-denial to build character. Your reason and your will are simply too weak to defeat your desires all the time. Individuals are strong, but they are not self-sufficient. To defeat sin you need help from outside. (Location 1197)
character. The tender character-building strategy is based on the idea that we can’t always resist our desires, but we can change and reorder our desires by focusing on our higher loves. Focus on your love for your children. Focus on your love of country. (Location 1201)
The most powerful way to fight sin is by living in a sweet, loving way. It’s how you do the jobs you do, whether it’s a prestigious job or not. (Location 1211)
As Clor observes, the moderate knows she cannot have it all. There are tensions between rival goods, and you just have to accept that you will never get to live a pure and perfect life, devoted to one truth or one value. The moderate has limited aspirations about what can be achieved in public life. (Location 1431)
It’s hard now to recapture how seriously people took novel reading then, or at least how seriously Day and others took it—reading important works as wisdom literature, believing that supreme artists possessed insights that could be handed down as revelation, trying to mold one’s life around the heroic and deep souls one found in books. Day read as if her whole life depended upon it. (Location 1574)
“One of the things that this year in the hospital made me realize is that one of the hardest things in the world is to organize ourselves and discipline ourselves.” (Location 1595)
She was constantly urging her co-workers to “stay small”: Start your work from where you live, with the small concrete needs right around you. Help ease tension in your workplace. Help feed the person right in front of you. (Location 1798)
Suffering simultaneously reminds us of our finitude and pushes us to see life in the widest possible connections, which is where holiness dwells. (Location 1894)
“Writing,” she wrote in one column in 1950, “is an act of community. It is a letter, it is comforting, consoling, helping, advising on our part as well as asking for it on yours. It is part of our human association with each other. (Location 1942)
It’s not that they were particularly brilliant or talented. The average collegiate GPA for a self-made millionaire is somewhere in the low B range. But at some crucial point in their lives, somebody told them they were too stupid to do something and they set out to prove the bastards wrong. (Location 2094)
Thomas Aquinas argued that in order to lead a good life, it is necessary to focus more on our exemplars than on ourselves, imitating their actions as much as possible. (Location 2111)
Today, it is unusual to meet someone with an institutional mindset. We live in an age of institutional anxiety, when people are prone to distrust large organizations. This is partly because we’ve seen the failure of these institutions and partly because in the era of the Big Me, we put the individual first. (Location 2247)
By practicing the customs of an institution, we are not alone; we are admitted into a community that transcends time. (Location 2268)
These are life-shaping and life-defining commitments. Like finding a vocation, they are commitments to something that transcends a single lifetime. (Location 2273)
Note: To help our fear of death?
But Marshall’s devotion and gratitude to his wife only deepened. Marshall was pleased to put himself in her service, supplying her with little surprises, compliments, and comforts, always giving the greatest attention to the smallest details. (Location 2295)
For most of this time, Mary Anne had nobody close to her intellectual level with whom she could discuss what she was reading. She invented a word to describe her condition: “non-impartitive.” She received information but could not digest it through conversation. (Location 3013)
Love depends on the willingness of each person to be vulnerable and it deepens that vulnerability. It works because each person exposes their nakedness and the other rushes to meet it. “You will be loved the day when you will be able to show your weakness without the person using it to assert his strength,” the Italian novelist Cesar Pavese wrote. (Location 3261)
Augustine found himself feeling increasingly isolated. If you organize your life around your own wants, other people become objects for the satisfaction of your own desires. (Location 3655)
One day, while walking in Milan, he observed a beggar who had clearly just finished a good meal and had a few drinks. The man was joking and joyful. Augustine realized that though he himself toiled and worked all day, fraught with anxieties, the beggar, who did none of these things, was happier than he was. Maybe he was suffering because he was shooting for higher goals, he considered. No, not really, he was seeking the same earthly pleasures as that beggar, but he was finding none of them. (Location 3671)
When unattached to the right ends, communities can be more barbarous than individuals. (Location 3723)
Grace doesn’t come to you because you’ve performed well on your job or even made great sacrifices as a parent or as a friend. Grace comes to you as part of the gift of being created. (Location 3904)
He wrote, “Happiness is not found in self contemplation; it is perceived only when it is reflected from another.” (Location 4201)