You can’t build rich lives simply by reading sermons or following abstract rules. Example is the best teacher. Moral improvement occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed,

most of us can only deny short-term pleasures because we see a realistic path between self-denial now and something better down the road.

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases.

As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.

Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America’s inability to take decisive...

there was perhaps a strain of humility that was more common then than now, that there was a moral ecology, stretching back centuries but less prominent now, encouraging people to be more skeptical of their...

Apparently, we have become such a hyper-individualized culture that it is impossible to develop an argument based on how individual cases fit into the fabric of the common good.

People tend to want to live up to their friends’ high regard.

[T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.

He read vividly.

Samuel Johnson placed this on his watch as a reminder near the end of his life; “The night cometh.

The inner struggle against one’s own weaknesses is the central drama of life.

In 1948, psychologists asked more than 10,000 adolescents whether they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was asked in 2003, and this time...

In childhood, the inexplicableness of the world is still vivid and fresh, and sometimes hits with terrifying force.

if you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it.

Humanities are the instructors of enchantment.

vocations almost always involve tasks that transcend a lifetime. They almost always involve throwing yourself into a historical process. They involve compensating for the brevity of life by finding membership in a historic commitment.

I make honorable things pleasant to children.” A teacher from Sparta

The point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts, it’s to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who...