“To me nothing whatever seems lengthy if it has an end; for when that end arrives, then that which was is gone; naught remains but the fruit of good and virtuous deeds. Hours may pass, and days and months and years, but the past returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know. But whatever the times given us to live, with the same we should be content.”—Cicero, De Senectute xix
“For even if the allotted space of life be short, it is long enough in which to live honorably and well. But if a longer period of years should be granted, one has no more cause to grieve than the famers do when the pleasant springtime passes and summer and autumn come. For spring typifies youth and holds forth the promise of future fruit; while the other seasons are designed for gathering those fruits and storing them away. And this same fruit of old age, as I have often said, is the memory and abundance of blessings previously gathered.”—Cicero, De Senectute xix
“But the most desirable end of life is that which comes while the mind is clear and the faculties are unimpaired, when Nature herself takes apart the work she has put together.”—Cicero, De Senectute xx
“Only the person who bows down and worships is wise. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. After all, and note this, because He is God, a necessary limit has been imposed on the omnipotence of God in his work of creation: God cannot create gods. That would have meant cancelling out his own unique being God. Thus a contrast, specifically a contrast of subordination, of inferiority, of a lower order, had to remain between God and his highest creature. Only in the image of God, not as God, could the rational creature be created. And it is from this contrast between God and the creature as not-God that all the anxiety of the broken moral life emerges.”—Kuyper, Common Grace II
“The conviction had to be awakened that justice is not a product of our whims, but an ordinance of God to which we have to submit ourselves…. Justice would not be a negotiation between doves and hawks, no matter how willingly or otherwise they might be able to stick it out together; rather, it would be the ascendancy among people of the social order God had ordained for them.”—Kuyper, Common Grace II
“Pythagoras is said to have maintained the following practice as a teacher: for seven years, according to the number of the seven liberal arts, no one of his pupils dared ask the reason behind statements made by him; instead, he was to give credence to the words of the master until he had heard him out, and then, having done this, he would be able to come at the reason of those things himself.”—Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon III.iii
“The student should take no less care not to expend his effort in useless studies than he should to avoid a bad pursuit of good and useful ones. It is bad to pursue something good negligently; it is worse to expend many labors on an empty thing.”—Hugh, Ibid. III.iii
“For this reason it appears to me that our efforts should first be given to the arts in which are the foundation stones of all things and in which pure and simple truth is revealed—and especially to the seven already mentioned, which comprise the tools of all philosophy; afterwards, if time affords, let these other things be read, for sometimes we are better pleased when entertaining reading is mixed with serious, and rarity makes what is good seem precious.”—Hugh, Ibid. III.v
“Three things are necessary for those who study: natural endowment, practice, and discipline.”—Hugh, Ibid. III.vi
“Consider, rather, what your powers [of learning] will at present permit: the man who proceeds stage by stage moves along best. Certain fellows, wishing to make a great leap of progress, sprawl headlong.”—Hugh, Ibid. III.13
“Nothing, however, is good if it eliminates a better thing. If you are not able to read everything, read those things which are more useful. Even if you should be able to read them all, however, you should not spend the same labor upon all. Some things are to be read that we may know them, but others that we may at least have heard of them, for sometimes we think that things of which we have not heard are of greater worth than they are, and we estimate more readily a thing whose fruit is known to us.”—Hugh, Ibid. III.13
“It is not conducive to [the theology student’s] aim that, carried away by an empty desire for knowledge, he should delve into writings which are obscure and of deep meaning, in which the mind is busied rather than edified, lest mere study take such a hold upon him that he is forced to give up good works. For the Christian philosopher reading ought to be a source of encouragement, not a preoccupation, and to feed good desires, not to kill them.”—Hugh, Ibid. V.vi
“Learn everything; you will see afterwards that nothing is superfluous.”—Hugh, Ibid. VI.iii
“But the face of England
was not the heart of it. A shrewd observer might have detected some perilous
yeast at work in men’s souls.”—John Buchan, Oliver Cromwell
