Dorothy L. Sayers, from her essay “Why Work?” (1942):

War is a judgment that overtakes societies when they have been living upon ideas that conflict too violently with the laws governing the universe…. Never think that wars are irrational catastrophes: they happen when wrong ways of thinking and living bring about intolerable situations; and whichever side may be the more outrageous in its aims and the more brutal in its methods, the root causes of conflict are usually to be found in some wrong way of life in which all parties have acquiesced, and for which everybody must, to some extent, bear the blame.

It strikes me that this is equally true of the culture war that Americans have been fighting with one another for quite some time.

Alan Jacobs

“We don’t need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do’s and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. ‘Thou shalt not’ is soon forgotten, but ‘Once upon a time’ lasts forever.”

Phillip Pulman via The Writer’s Almanac

Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man’s power to live long.”

— Seneca the Younger (4 BC–AD 65), “Moral Letters to Lucilius”

Via Wisdom Letter

Reminds me how much I miss reading Sententiae Antiquae

It would be a tragedy if writers stopped using em dashes out of fear of sounding like AI, because em dashes are one of the best tools writers have for not sounding robotic in the first place. Their very potential to be irritating is a sign of what makes them so beautiful: Of all the forms of punctuation, the em dash is the one that most rewards tact, judgment, and taste. It has the closest relationship to the way we experience thinking—rushing forward, suddenly swerving, forking into different branches that eventually come together again. If chatbots copy our use of it, they do so for the same reason we need to protect it. It’s the most human punctuation there is.

via Brian Phillips and Alan Jacobs

Art is the speech of an artist, of an individual, and it testifies to the power of individuals to speak and to the power of other individuals to listen and understand.