Mike Cusack > Mike's Quotes

“All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor

“Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands. And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much

“When I'm brave and strong, and care for children and the sick and the poor, I become a better person. And when I'm cruel, cowardly, or tell lies, or get drunk, I turn into someone less worthy, and I can't respect myself. That's the divine retribution I believe in”
― Ken Follett, World Without End

“Self-discipline is often disguised as short-term pain, which often leads to long-term gains. The mistake many of us make is the need and want for short-term gains (immediate gratification), which often leads to long-term pain.”
― Charles F. Glassman, Brain Drain - The Breakthrough That Will Change Your Life

“Without self-discipline, success is impossible, period.”
― Lou Holtz

“The real difference in the believer who follows Christ and has mortified his will and died after the old man in Christ, is that he is more clearly aware than other men of the rebelliousness and perennial pride of the flesh, he is conscious of his sloth and self-indulgence and knows that his arrogance must be eradicated. Hence there is a need for daily self-discipline.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

“Here we see that a key purpose of education is a fundamentally conservative--or preservative--one. Education should preserve and transmit the past so that cultural memory is lengthened, and so that descendants will not be left to rediscover human truths already endured and expressed by eloquent forebears.”
― Tracy Lee Simmons

“History and literature rebuke our self-sufficiency; that's one reason why we ought to study them. It's not so much that people of olden times were the finest exemplars of higher humanity, for they too fell short of their ideals, as must all who aspire to higher things--that's what ideals are for. It's that we have abandoned those ideals once animating our civilization, refusing to learn them anew with each generation. We have assumed their transfer to be automatic. We have not indeed jettisoned the hope and drive that keep us working for a better world (that's the good news), but we have forgotten to cultivate ourselves as individuals.”
― Tracy Lee Simmons, Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin

“The world could do with fewer scholars and more cultivated people.”
― Tracy Lee Simmons

“Man may not be the colossus some secular spirits would have him be, armed with the strength and wisdom of the gods, but he has partaken of ambrosia. He has squinted trough the veil and seen just enough of divinity to measure himself by it. The Humanist knows both the strengths and the frailties of man. He strives. But he knows the bounds of his striving.......

Visions and ideals need a path, a way, a roadmap people can use as to arrive at those better, more permanent things that the wise are always seeing dimly whenever they strained their eyes. So man turned a mirror on himself, looked soberly, and-one day-began to write accounts of the discoveries made on the grandest odyssey of them all: the journey to the core of the human mind and soul. The grateful among us read them.”
― Tracy Lee Simmons