Eric Scheske

There is an amiable muse and a mordant muse. I'm not sure which should be indulged more. The amiable muse is more edifying; the mordant muse, more entertaining.

Thomas Merton described the Tao as “the simple good with which one is endowed by the very fact of existence. Instead of self-conscious cultivation of this good (which vanishes when we look at it and becomes intangible when we try to grasp it), we grow quietly in the humility

Never underestimate your greed. It's ivy in the soul, creeping everywhere, fertilized by pride.

"Everyone has within himself something he does not know as long as he has not searched it out; but if he has searched it out–he shudders." Boethius

It's Just My Imagination In the second volume of lectures published posthumously as Redeeming the Time, Russell Kirk celebrates the workings of the moral imagination (the power of ethical perception) and contrasts it with the idyllic imagination (the fanciful imagination of people like Rousseau) and the diabolic imagination

When a sneering acquaintance told the poverty-bitten Diogenes that he wouldn't have to eat lentils (a poor man's food) if only he would learn to flatter the king, Diogenes said his acquaintance wouldn't have to flatter the king if he just learned to

"To be subtle without ceasing to be simple; to be realist, yet not crude; to be minute at the right moment, but not all the time; to add here and there the little concrete touch, but only here and there–this, at their best, the Greeks achieved." F.

Pithecanthropus Pithecanthropus is the Ape Man. He's also known as Java Man and Peking Man. Latin-loving scientists call him Homo erectus, Homo modjokertenses, Meganthropus palaeojavanicus, Pithecanthropus robustus, and Pithecanthropus dubius. He is the creation of Dutch physician Eugene Dubois. In the 1890's, Dubois discovered a

"It is aptly related of the great Dr. Clarke, that when in one of his leisure hours he was unbending himself with a few friends in the most playful and frolicksome manner, he observed Beau Nash approaching; upon which he suddenly stopped–'My boys (said he), let us

There are at least three doors of nomative perception: revelation, custom or common sense, and the insights of the seer. (Adapted from Russell Kirk)