“Blood and power intoxicate; they help to develop callousness and debauchery. The mind then becomes capable of the most abnormal cruelty, which it regards pleasure; the man and the citizen are swallowed up in the tyrant; and the return to human dignity, repentance, moral resurrection, becomes almost impossible."
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The House of the Dead
"What we give to the poor, for Christ's sake, is what we carry with us when we die."
Peter Maurin
Need little, want less, love more. For those who abide in love abide in God, and God in them.
"What we would like to do is change the world — make it a little simpler for people to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves as God intended them to do. We can throw our pebble in the pond and be confident that its ever widening circle will reach around the world."
Dorothy Day
“People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.
If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway. If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.
The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.
For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway.”
Mother Teresa
"De loin en loin, elle vient jeter dans l’âme du profond artiste un peu de sa paix, de sa grandeur mystérieuse, puis elle retourne à sa solitude immense, au milieu des rues pleines de peuple.
Il n’y a qu’une tristesse, lui a-t-elle dit, la dernière fois, c’est de n’être pas de saints."
"Wonderful providence indeed which is so silent, yet so efficacious, so constant, so unerring. This is what baffles the power of Satan. He cannot discern the Hand of God in what goes on; and though he would fain meet it and encounter it, in his mad and blasphemous rebellion against heaven, he cannot find it.
Crafty and penetrating as he is, yet his thousand eyes and his many instruments avail him nothing against the majestic serene silence, the holy imperturbable calm which reigns through the providences of God. He makes a guess here, or does a bold act there, but all in the dark.
If even devils, sagacious as they are, spirits by nature and experienced in evil, cannot detect His hand while He works, how can we hope to see it except by that way which the devils cannot take, by loving faith."
John Henry Newman
"The Lord did not come to make a display. He came to heal and to teach suffering humanity. For one who wanted to make a display the thing would have been to appear and dazzle the beholders.
But for Him Who came to heal and to teach, the way was not just to appear here, but to place Himself in the service of those who needed Him, and to be made known to them as they could accept it, not diminishing the value of His Divine presence by overwhelming their capacity to receive it."
Athanasius, On the Incarnation of the Word, 335 AD
“There is not a moment in which God does not present Himself under the cover of some pain to be endured, of some consolation to be enjoyed, or of some duty to be performed. All that takes place within us, around us, or through us, contains and conceals His divine action. All souls must admire and respect one another, walking along our path to the same goal, united in purpose and with the help of God's plan which, in its great variety, is in us all.
To escape the pain caused by regret for the past or fear about the future, this is the rule to follow: leave the past to the infinite mercy of God, the future to His good Providence, and give the present wholly to His love by being faithful to His grace.”
Jean-Pierre de Caussade, L'Abandon a la Providence Divine
“Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist— and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have life.”
Léon Bloy
After the shockingly high ADP Jobs Report the official BLS Non-Farm Payrolls report came in shockingly low.
How much of a surprise was this? Let me subpoena a few VIP trading books please and I will tell you.
“Two armies that fight each other is like one large army that commits suicide.”
Henri Barbusse, Le Feu: journal d'une escouade, 1916
"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."
George Orwell
"Wars do not usually result from just causes but from pretexts. There probably never was a just cause why men should slaughter each other by wholesale, but there are such things as ambition, selfishness, folly, madness, in communities as in individuals, which become blind and bloodthirsty, not to be appeased save by havoc, and generally by the killing of somebody else than themselves.
You don’t know the horrible aspects of war. I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. Some of you young men think that war is all glamour and glory, but let me tell you, boys, it is all Hell."
William Tecumseh Sherman, address to the Michigan Military Academy, 19 June 1879
"One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them."
Thomas Sowell
This morning the ADP Jobs report came in smoking hot, prompting the markets to start fretting about the Non-Farm Payrolls report tomorrow morning, and its effect on the decisions of the Fed.
This is beyond doubt a Fed-centric bubble market.
The Dollar and the metals fell.
Stocks fell.
VIX moved a bit higher.
Hi ho.
Let's see how the numbers come in tomorrow morning.
Let us pray for those whose hearts are hardened against His grace and loving kindness by greed, fear, and pride, and the seductive illusion and crushing isolation of evil.
We pray that we all may experience the three great gifts of our Lord's suffering and triumph: repentance, forgiveness, and thankfulness. And in so doing, may we obtain abundant life, and with it the peace that surpasses all understanding.
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