Byron on Southey

"Byron prophesied that Southey's Joan of Arc, An Epic Poem would be read 'when Homer and Virgil are forgotten, but--not till then.'"

Timothy Larsen, "Reading habits," Books and culture 14, no. 5 (September/October 2008): 34.

Honour all men

"a Christian is like a little child; a little child is modest before men, and his heart is apt to be possessed with fear and awe among them.
"The same spirit will dispose a Christian to honour all men. . . . A humble Christian is not only disposed to honour the saints in his behavior; but others also, in all those ways that do not imply a visible approbation of their sins."

Jonathan Edwards, The religious affections, pt. 3, sec. 6 ((Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1986 [1961]), 265).

Edwards on the sole "direct, clear, and all-conquering evidence" of "the truth of the great things of the gospel"

"The gospel of the blessed God does not go abroad a-begging for its evidence. . . ."

Jonathan Edwards, The religious affections, pt. 3, sec. 5 ((Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1986 [1961]), 233).

Too close for comfort

. . . what I say to you, I say
as one that is a stranger to the story
as stranger to the deed. For I would not
be far upon the track if I alone
were tracing it without a clue.

Oedipus, in Sophocles, Oedipus the king, trans. David Grene.

Baciocchi on Mary

"Of the Jewish woman under the Old Testament more than any other is it true that she comes into the world humanly and religiously vowed to maternity by the whole hope of her people."

Joseph de Baciocchi, "Immaculée conception," Catholicisme: hier, aujourd'hui, demain 5 (1962), col. 1276. And yet still, Mary remains "blessed . . . among [even Jewish] women".

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity

"As I look at the town now, dwindling without grace, I think how strange that lives were lost in its formation."

Judge Antone Bazil Coutts in Louise Erdrich's The plague of doves, as quoted by Claire Messud, "Blood relations," New York review of books 55, no. 12 (July 17, 2008): 38.

Speaking of fifth-rate minds like mine (and first-rate minds, too)

"If [the flight from understanding] never refuses to supply superficial minds with superficial positions, it is quite competent to work out a philosophy so acute and profound that the elect strive in vain and for centuries to lay bare its real inadequacies."

Bernard Lonergan, Insight: a study of human understanding (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1958 [1957]), xii.