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Will Davis
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Reading for the 2nd time
read in 2021
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(page 80 of 458)
"I'm literally hanging out with my best friends in the whole world" — Dec 25, 2025 02:25PM
"I'm literally hanging out with my best friends in the whole world" — Dec 25, 2025 02:25PM
“There is a Pagan, savage heart in me somewhere. For unfortunately the folly and idiot-cunning of Paganism seem to have far more power of surviving than its innocent or even beautiful elements. It is easy, once you have power, to silence the pipes, still the dances, disfigure the statues, and forget the stories; but not easy to kill the savage, the greedy, frightened creature now cringing, now blustering, in one's soul - the creature to whom God may well say, "thou thoughtest I am even such a one as thyself".”
― Reflections on the Psalms
― Reflections on the Psalms
“The ultimate concept in Greek philosophy is the idea of cosmos, of order; the first teaching in the Bible is the idea of creation. Translated into eternal principles, cosmos means fate, while creation means freedom. The essential meaning of creation is not the idea that the universe was created at a particular moment in time. The essential meaning of creation is, as Maimonides explained, the idea that the universe did not come about by necessity but as a result of freedom.”
― God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism
― God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism
“The sacrament of penance is not, therefore, a sacred and juridical "power" given by God to men. It is the power of baptism as it lives in the Church. From baptism it receives its sacramental character. In Christ all sins are forgiven once and for all, for He is Himself the forgiveness of sins, and there is no need for any "new" absolution. But there is indeed the need for us who constantly leave Christ and excommunicate ourselves from His life, to return to Him, to receive again and again the gift which in Him has been given once and for all. And the absolution is the sign that this return has taken place and has been fulfilled. Just as each Eucharist is not a "repetition" of Christ's supper but our ascension, our acceptance into the same and eternal banquet, so also the sacrament of penance is not a repetition of baptism, but our return to the "newness of life" which God gave to us once and for all.”
― For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy
― For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy
“Freedom is not simple, for it always is involved with responsibility. The relation between freedom and responsibility is not a “balance” to be expediently adjusted by governments or citizens, who without both can have neither. I have quoted John Milton’s definition of freedom before, and I am going to quote it again, for it is complex and precise enough to have the force of an essential justice: “To be free,” Milton wrote, “is precisely the same thing as to be pious, wise, just, and temperate, careful of one’s own, abstinate from what is another’s and thence, in fine, magnanimous and brave.”
― Our Only World: Ten Essays
― Our Only World: Ten Essays
“But the most awful thing they can do with you is this: undress you from the waist down, place you on your back on the floor, pull your legs apart, seat assistants on them (from the glorious corps of sergeants!) who also hold down your arms; and then the interrogator (and women interrogators have not shrunk from this) stands between your legs and with the toe of his boot (or of her shoe) gradually, steadily, and with ever greater pressure crushes against the floor those organs which once made you a man. He looks into your eyes and repeats and repeats his questions or the betrayal he is urging on you. If he does not press down too quickly or just a shade too powerfully, you still have fifteen seconds left in which to scream that you will confess to everything, that you are ready to see arrested all twenty of those people he's been demanding of you, or that you will slander in the newspapers everything you hold holy..
And may you be judged by God, but not by people. ...”
― The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
And may you be judged by God, but not by people. ...”
― The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Will’s 2025 Year in Books
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