"He moves through the world leaving people more alive to the things he loves."

Edmund de Waal, of Proust's Swann and by implication his own fourth cousin Charles Ephrussi, in The hare with the amber eyes: a family's century of art and loss (New York, NY:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 106.

"you cause sufferings upon sufferings, in a miserable, lamentable welter of catastrophe."

The Chorus in Euripides' Helen, ll. 1163-1164, trans. James Morwood (Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, Helen, trans. & ed. James Morwood, Oxford world's classics (Oxford & New York:  Oxford University Press, 1998), 152).   The Greek is more concrete:

ἐπὶ δὲ πάθεα πάθεσι φέρεις
ἀθλίοις ἐν σψμφοραῖς ᾿Ιλίοις.

Euripides on the point of punctuation

What is god, or is not god, or what is in between?
Which of mortals can say after searching?
He who can see the divine
leaping this way and that and back again
in contradictory unexpected shifts of fortune,
he it is who has got furthest towards an answer. . . .
. . . I can find no certainty among men,
no true report, about the gods above.

The Chorus in Euripides' Helen, ll. 1137-1150, trans. James Morwood (Medea, Hippolytus, Electra, Helen, trans. & ed. James Morwood, Oxford world's classics (Oxford & New York:  Oxford University Press, 1998), 152).

Carey on the pursuit of prosperity

"It is strange, in New York and Philadelphia, to see the feverish enthusiasm which accompanies Americans' pursuit of prosperity and the way they are ceaselessly tormented by the vague fear that they have failed to choose the shortest route to achieve it."

Olivier, in Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (New York, NY:  Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 237.

"of whom the world was not worthy"

"MAY THERE BE REMEMBERED, LORD, on your holy altar at the fearful moment when your Body and Blood are sacrificed for the salvation of the world, all the fathers and brethren who are on mountains, in caves, in ravines, cliffs, rugged and desolate places, who are hidden from the world and it is only known to you where they are - those who have died and those still living and ministering before you in body and soul, you the Holy One who dwell in the holy ones in whom your divinity finds rest; those who have abandoned the temporal world and have already become dead to its life in that they have gone out in search of you, seeking you with yearning amidst the afflictions of their weary state.  O king of all worlds and of all the orthodox fathers who, for the sake of the truth of the faith, have endured exile and afflictions at the hands of persecutors, who in monasteries, convents, deserts and habitations of the world, everywhere and in every place, have made it their care to please you with labours for the sake of virtue:  accompany them with your assistance, Lord, and be a helmet for them always, send them continual comfort in secret, and bind their minds close to you in all their struggles; may the power of your Trinity dwell in them, and may they minister to you right up to the end of their lives with a good conscience and with a good manner of life.  Hold them worthy while they are still in the body of the harbour of rest.  And to those who are encountering hard battles with the demons, whether openly or in secret, send succour, Lord, and overshadow them with the cloud of your grace; place on their mind's head the helmet of salvation, bring low the power of the enemy before them, and may the might of your right hand support them at all times lest they grow weak in their thoughts, failing to gaze continually towards you; clothe them in the armour of humility, that a sweet scent may waft from them at all times, giving pleasure to your will."

     "The prayers of St Isaac the Syrian" (=chap. 5 of the long lost Second Part of the Writings) no. 26, trans. Sebastian Brock, Sobornost 16, no. 1 (1994): 28-29 (20-31).

Rogers on analogy and the queen of the sciences

"In modern parlance, we hear the quotation marks if we say that objects under gravity 'know' where to go, and think of the verb as metaphorical.  For Aquinas, too, such a use of 'know' would be unusual.  But the extension of meaning would go beyond metaphor.   The world itself, for Aquinas, exhibits an ordered series of harmonious structures, repeating on different levels and in different aspects:  he calls their relation analogy.  If you insisted that to recapitulate in language an analogy between crystals and minds was to equivocate, Aquinas would reply with a distinction:  some equivocations mislead; this equivocation is strictly appropriate.  Refuse to admit it, and you are blocking the light, the light by which things are enlightening the mind.  That is the light of reason, of ratio, of appropriate proportion or structure in the world and in us.
     "For Aquinas, all kinds of knowledge—especially Aristotelian scientia—depend on sources of light, on smaller revelations.  First principles are manifestations of forms in the world, joining in one that which idiom divides, namely the form that inheres indifferently in minds and things.  Each Aristotelian science is thus originated and individuated by its formal rationale or light.  If you understand frogs, then you get light from frogs that gives rise to frog science in human minds.  If you understand frogs, that also shows that frogs manifest frog-light, the first principles of frog, that give rise also to followable frog-structure in frogs themselves.  That is also science, the science in frogs.  The science in frogs gives light, and the science of frogs appears in the light.  The more you attend to the first principles of frogs, the better science you have.  The more you attend to frog-light, the more scientific your discipline is.  The more something is revealed, therefore, the more scientific it is.  Theology is no exception to that rule.  Theology exemplifies that rule.  Theology is for that reason not science by disciplinary extension; theology is science par excellence."

     Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., "Thomas Aquinas on knowing and coming to know:  the beatific vision and learning from contingency," in Creation and the God of Abraham, ed. David B. Burrell, Carlo Cogliati, Janet M. Soskice, and William R. Stoeger (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 248-249 (238-258).  For Rogers' comments on the true "distinction between the science that is sacred doctrine [(which, 'at least in this life, . . . is a science without scientists' (255))] and the sciences that are natural," see pp. 254 ff.  (1) "Knowing," or Aristotelian epagoge (insight), is characteristic of "only God and the blessed in heaven" (238 ff., 256; "Aquinas recognizes that there is something so teleological about epagoge that it is not quite human" (241), and "troubles and disrupts Aristotle's commitments to teleology at several turns" (240)).  Here below we have only (2) "coming to know," or the gradual but systematic exploitation of the contingency unattended to by Aristotle.  "Retroduction, or contriving experiment, is [Thomistic] ethics applied to matter:  it tests the character of things" (244).  Etc.  Aquinas as a thoroughly modern scientist.  Brilliant.  A tour de force.  Worthy of a third or fourth read.

McMullin on the laws of nature

"Laws are the explananda; they are the questions, not the answers."

     Ernan McMullin, The inference that makes science, The Aquinas Lecture, 1992 (Milwaukee, WI:  Marquette University Press, 1992), 90.