Whenever there is a withering of the law
and an uprising of lawlessness on all sides,
then I manifest Myself.

For the salvation of the righteous
and the destruction of such as do evil,
for the firm establishing of the Law,
I come to birth, age after age.

 Bhagavad Gita, Book IV, Sutra 5, 7, 8

Ullrich told me about a small boy who was dying of neuroblastoma. “His mother made it very clear to him that she would see him again in Heaven someday. ... But he was worried about how he would find her. So they made a plan to meet in the front left corner of Heaven."

Jerome Groopman in The New Yorker, "Lives Less Ordinary" (January 20, 2014)

Christmas time ... a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. 


Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

This is essentially a people's contest. On the side of the Union it is a struggle for maintaining in the world that form and substance of government whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life.

Abraham Lincoln on the effort to preserve the United States government in America's Civil War, from his First Message to Congress, July 4, 1861.

There is scarce truth enough alive to make societies secure;
but security enough to make fellowships accurst.

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Thou art not thyself;
For thou exists on many a thousand grains
That issue out of the dust.

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

O place, O form,
How often dost thou with thy case, thy habit,
Wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls
To thy false seeming!

Blood, thou art blood.


William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

Non coerceri a maximo, sed contineri a minimo divinum est

(“not to be limited by the greatest and yet to be contained in the tiniest—this is the divine”).

Quoted by Pope Francis on the vision of St. Ignatius

You should only pick your own nose.


Heard from a nice lady in Iowa.