Sublime

But smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it livable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities. Your loyalty to your local taxi firm is one of those delicate social threads that, multiplied

I did not perceive that great changes had taken place on the common, such as he observed who went in a youth and emerged a tottering and gray-headed man; and yet a change had to my eyes come over the scene—the town, and State, and country—greater than any that mere time could effect. I saw yet more distinctly the State in which I lived. I saw to

“The true task facing pastors and lay leaders,” he wrote, “is that of reminding wayward members of the benefits of spiritual education, the joy of community, and the richness of fellowship with other believers.”11

Consider the shift from a contract in which by giving you receive to an understanding that I should claim what I want as long as I don’t impede others from doing the same. A shift from a search for communal happiness to a search for personal pleasure. A shift from the values of shared security

There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

He simply smiled and said, “Not much,” offering no further explanation. (It later came to my knowledge that he worked part-time helping children with disabilities.)

What if the 87 percent of baby boomers who believe in God decided that a central way they were going to spend their retirement was by mentoring young people through their local church?

The columns that I wrote for Life made people laugh. But they had a serious purpose, which was to say: “Something crazy is going on here—some erosion in the quality of life, or some threat to life itself, and yet everyone assumes it’s normal.” Today the outlandish becomes routine overnight. The humorist is trying to say that it’s still outlandish.

I heartily accept the motto,—“That government is best which governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—“That government is best which governs not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will