From My Commonplace Book

"The Reading Room" by Carl Larsson

"Books to the ceiling, books to the sky.
 My piles of books are a mile high.
 How I love them!
 How I need them!
 I'll have a long beard by the time I read them."

~Arnold Lobel

"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." ~ Noam Chomsky

“For a liberal arts education is not a tool like a hoe or a blueprint or an electric mixer. It is a true and precious stone which can glow just as wholesomely on a kitchen table as when it is put on exhibition in a jeweler’s window or bartered for bread and butter. Learning is a boon, a personal good. It is a light in the mind, a pleasure for the spirit, an object to be enjoyed. It is refreshment, warmth, illumination, a window from which we get a view of the world. To what barbarian plane are we descending when we demand that it serve only the economy?” ~Phyllis McGinley

"The Church gave up beauty and then found that our proclamations of truth and goodness fell on deaf ears." ~John Mason Hodges

"Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy is more romantic than extravagance... thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste... if a man could undertake to make use of all the things in his dustbin, he would be a broader genius than Shakespeare." ~G.K. Chesterton

 "But by far the most important channel of transmission of culture remains the family: and when family life fails to play its part, we must expect our culture to deteriorate. But when I speak of family, I have in mind a bond which embraces a longer period of time than this [i.e. the sentimentalized affection of family in the sense of two parents and one or two young children]: a piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn, however remote." ~T.S. Eliot