Quotations, thoughts, and incomplete half-baked musings I found worth recording while I read a bunch of books. Mostly on spirituality, Christianity, philosophy.

July 3, 2025

Purely external destruction of the ‘I’ is quasi-infernal suffering. External destruction with which the soul associates itself through love is expiatory suffering. The bringing about of the absence of God in the soul completely emptied of self through love is redemptive suffering.

Weil, Gravity & Grace

July 3, 2025

The organism, its decay, the indestructibility of matter, the law of conservation of energy, development, were the words that had replaced his former faith. These words, and the concepts connected with them, were very well suited to the intellectual purposes, but they gave nothing for life, and Levin suddenly felt himself in the position of a person who has traded his warm fur coat for muslin clothing and, caught in the cold for the first time, is convinced beyond question, not by reasoning but with his whole being, that he is as good as naked and must inevitably die a painful death.

Anna Karenina

July 2, 2025

Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.

Anna Karenina

July 2, 2025 Why do conservatives idealize rural and small-town American towns, and yet conservative places nearly always look so different? "They long for a dream house, not a dream city.” — Space is the highest value in a world without a public sphere. People who have never lived in a place with thriving public life do not long for it – they long to more effectively bring life's pleasures home with them.

June 30, 2025 “Prayer is breaking the fourth wall.”

June 28, 2025

I don't study to know more, but to ignore less.