Stout Wisdom

The 1960s was an era of large thoughts. And, yet, amazingly, each of those thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.

What, I ask, is the truth of water? Is it that it is formed of hydrogen and oxygen? … There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyze.

You can take all the sincerity of Hollywood, shove it into a gnat’s naval, and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and an agent’s heart.

We have war within us, whether or not there’s one to wage.

What you do for me, but without me, you do against me.

Once there was a reigning personal style of public reticence about private pain. You didn’t share it with everybody, and you didn’t use it for advantage or as a weapon: I have known pain, you must bow before me. The forces of modernity have washed away the old boundary between public and private. It isn’t good. It’s making us less human even as we claim to be more sensitive.

“What we call ‘civilization’ is a smoldering heap of violence constantly on the verge of bursting into flame.”

Antagonism toward a mate is first of all antagonism toward God. Lack of love for a marriage partner is really lack of love for God.

“Not everything is meant to be mended. Not all relationships are meant to last a lifetime. Sometimes we have to learn to get comfortable with the gifts that are offered through the ruptures and the endings instead of the stories of repair and reconciliation.”

Never hesitate to take what you think are small things to God; after all, EVERYTHING is small to God. 

 A cup of sweet water could never spill a drop of bitter water, no matter how heavily it was jolted.  

The harmony of natural law reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is utterly insignificant reflection.

It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.

When a man or woman puts on a uniform and straps on a gun—whether they’re a police officer or a soldier—they should be making a profound declaration. They’re willing to die to protect their community and their nation. They don’t want to die, of course. But they’re willing to pay the “last full measure of devotion” if that moment arrives.

See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.