If you pay a child a dollar to read a book, as some schools have tried, you not only create an expectation that reading makes you money, you also run the risk of depriving the child for ever of the value of it. Markets are not innocent.
Category Archive: March 5
Rich or poor, every child comes into the world with some imperative need of its own, which shapes its individuality.
When I heard that there were artists, I wished I could some time be one. If I could only make a rose bloom on paper, I thought I should be happy! Or if I could at last succeed in drawing the outline of winter-stripped boughs as I saw them against the sky, it seemed to me that I should be willing to spend years in trying.
The responsibility of political philosophy that tries to engage with practice is to be clear, or at least accessible.
We were not meant to mask ourselves before our fellow-beings, but to be, through our human forms, true and clear utterances of the spirit within. Since God gave us these bodies, they must have been given us as guides to Him and revealers of Him.
Democracy does not require perfect equality, but it does require that citizens share a common life. What matters is that people of different backgrounds and social positions encounter one another, and bump up against one another, in the course of ordinary life.
To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
Labor, in itself, is neither elevating or otherwise. It is the laborer’s privilege to ennoble his work by the aim with which he undertakes it, and by the enthusiasm and faithfulness he puts into it.
Some of us must wait for the best human gifts until we come to heavenly places. Our natural desire for musical utterance is perhaps a prophecy that in a perfect world we shall all know how to sing.
Whether rich or poor, a home is not a home unless the roots of love are ever striking deeper through the crust of the earthly and the conventional, into the very realities of being, not consciously always; seldom, perhaps; the simplicity of loving grows by living simply near nature and God.