An empty throne always tempts me.
An obligation is something which constrains or induces us to act.
The cheat ambition, eager to espouse dominion, courts it with a lying show, and shines in borrowed pomp to serve a turn.
He will always see the most beauty whose affections are the warmest and most exercised, whose imagination is the most powerful, and who has most accustomed himself to attend to the objects by which he is surrounded.
Opinions founded on prejudice are always sustained with the greatest of violence.
Nothing is so firmly than that which is least known.
Derision is never so agonizing as when it pounces on the wanderings of misguided sensibility.
Am I afraid of high notes? Of course I am afraid. What sane man is not?
. . . the Lord said as He drew near His passion, 'Now is the Son of man glorified, and God is glorified in Him. If God is glorified in Him, God will also glorify Him in Himself; and He will glorify Him at once' (Jn. 13:31-32). From This it is clear that divine gifts follow sufferings endured for the sake of virtue.
I spent my childhood scrambling round badgers and foxes and playing fantastic country kid games like knocking on people's doors and running away. God that was a good game.
It's funny how insomnia has a way of hauling faded memories up from the cellar of the mind, unearthing buried bits of nostalgia from deep within and spreading the broken, jagged pieces out in front of you like a display of junk at a garage sale. It makes you feel cheap and guilty when you didn't do a thing in the world to kindle the dull burn in your veins or the sting in your eyes. Some nights the painful past unexpectedly pushes up through the floorboards like an ugly nightmarish weed, and by doing so, cultivates and nurtures an entirely new species of headache.