Ida Friederike Görres: Read

Ida Friederike Görres was Austrian writer and noble. Explore interesting quotes on read.
Ida Friederike Görres: 114   quotes 0   likes

“Even read in such broken bits Origen is real food and drink. You can feel it being absorbed, right away, into your very blood. How terse, how compact he is! All this modern stuff is barley-water in comparison.”

Ida Friederike Görres

Broken Lights p. 87 Diaries 1951-1952.

Food , Feeling , Drink , Water

“I'm reading a very quaint American book, The Power of Positive Thinking, written, I'd suppose, by a sectarian minister, presumably of Methodist dye. (Norman Vincent Peale).. He's full of stories of prayers heard - and extols the power of prayer.."Before leaving for an important business conference I brace myself with texts like 'If God be for us, who can be against us?'… Then I stalk into the conference room, sure of my victory, and carry off the most marvellous deal.." This, in essence is the burden of the whole book. That's what people call Christian optimism. But it's wasted on us - we've been spoilt for this sort of thing… But isn't it rather self suggestion than authentic religious impulse? It doesn't seem to have dawned on him that suffering, disappointment, defeat or loss might also have some point too, or that God's designs could sometimes be hidden…”

Ida Friederike Görres

Broken Lights Letters 1951-59.

God , People , Books , Disappointment

“I'm reading a biography of St John Baptist de la Salle - Extraordinary what educational insights and experiments have existed already - and what has been forgotten!. That reformatory, for instance, which he founded on the most amazing principles somewhere around 1680…The young delinquents were detained in solitary confinement to begin with, being promoted later.. to community life.. But in their single cells they were given flowers and plants to cultivate and singing birds to breed! The prisoners took their meals together with the Brothers, and each of the boys in solitary confinement was entrusted to one particular Brother…The Jansenists were bitter opponents of the Brothers, for in all his schools de la Salle laid great stress on frequent Communion.. They did their best to oppose him personally and to hinder his work. The French Revolution wrecked his Institute, some of the Brothers were executed, others emigrated.”

Ida Friederike Görres

Broken Lights Letters 1951-59.

Life , Education , School , Boy

“Reading lots of Dickens. Barnaby Rudge: the last Catholic pogrom - No Popery, the Gordon Riots in London - 1780, twenty years before Newman was born. He must have known people who had set fire to the houses, or taken in victims and refugees. Lord George Gordon who led the mob (obviously a religious maniac) died as late as 1793. Old Curiosity Shop, Nicholas Nickleby - this too, is part of Newman's background, this gallery of living gargoyles, ghouls and monsters. Might account, perhaps, even for some of Newman's pessimism about the world and human nature, which some attribute merely to his own melancholy disposition? That nineteenth century!!”

Ida Friederike Görres

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

People , World , Nature , Reading

“Reading O'Rahilly's life of Father William Doyle. I'm surprised this book hasn't left a deeper mark, for it contains - often in parallel terms - the whole teaching of the Little Way which created such a stir in the case of Thérèse. But it seems people prefer to accept such things from a lovely young girl complete with smile, roses and veil. One can't help wondering whether Thérèse would have met with the same enormous response had she been hopelessly ugly - a hunchback with a squint, or old…”

Ida Friederike Görres

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57

Love , Life , People , Books

“I'm reading George Borrow's Lavengro… and, of course, it fits perfectly into the pattern of my current reading! - Fallada and Arnold Bennett's The Old Wives Tale, i. e. my constant musings on the nineteenth century. I was amazed to learn from Bennett's book that in Papa's childhood you could watch an execution, which was a public entertainment, a real show, with high prices paid for windows with a good view, and the local hotels doing a roaring trade.”

Ida Friederike Görres

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

Books , Learning , Reading , Childhood

“I'm reading Kristin Lavransdatter again - it's one of the greatest poetic books, and the most powerful portrayal of medieval Christendom I know…. I must admit that it makes me cry every time - because it's so real, so true, reaching to the depths of human nature, touching one to the quick.”

Ida Friederike Görres

Broken Lights Letters 1951-59.

Books , Nature , Time , Reading

“Goethe, whose letters I've been reading very intensively during the past few weeks, is always stressing Verträglichkeit - agreeing to live and let live - as the most important element of friendship: we shouldn't try to change people, but simply let them be as they are, making the best of even partial concord, instead of trying to force a fictitious perfect harmony.”

Ida Friederike Görres

Broken Lights p. 82 Diaries 1951-1952

Friendship , People , Change , Reading

“I've just finished reading Shakespeare's Sonnets, that is, I've read and understood them for the first time. One passionate, desolate lament - immeasurable and inconsolable - for the waning, wasting and passing of beauty. At the same time there's something disturbingly un-Christian here - the utterly heathen, desperate keening of the dirges, the grisly dances of death, danses macabres, in which death is nothing but the end, finality - destruction, not transition.”

Ida Friederike Görres

Broken Lights p. 38 Diaries 1951

Death , Beauty , Passion , Time

“Been reading Hardy's Return of the Native. Astonishing how moral standards have shifted over the past hundred years:shifted isn't the word - a landslide… Today the problems of these nineteenth-century novels strike us as exaggerated, as bathos, even comical - much ado about nothing. But for these people it really was a struggle with the gods, very real, menacing, dangerous gods.”

Ida Friederike Görres

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

God , People , Problem , Reading

“I'm reading Günther Anders' Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (The Antiquity of Man).. That bit about Promethean shame impressed me.. observations about the shame of being oneself, the reluctance at stepping out of line, of being forward, of being looked at. This is entirely true to life…Yet it's just as natural to man to want to be seen, to want to be outstanding, to be regarded, as to want to hide - and both these instincts - for that's what they are - clash, often with equal force…How clearly I see the Little Flower in this light: from earliest days the focal point for her whole family, yet on the other hand sincerely desiring to be hidden, taking the veil”

Ida Friederike Görres

and so wonderfully unveiled to posterity, revealed to the world, set up as an image, i.e. to be looked at!
Broken Lights Diaries 1957-59.

Life , World , Family , Flowers

“Trochu's Vianney book makes me shudder. Positively frightening - and the saint too. The first time I read it I was quite horrified…Actually he is a second Simeon Stylites - and how hard and stern he is - and not only against himself: he would excommunicate his parishioners if they even once went dancing or drinking - like the most rigorous Puritan.. For him sin involved personal, direct single combat with Satan…But there's no glove to Vianney's peasant fist. He's really gruesome.”

Ida Friederike Görres

Broken Lights Letters 1951-59.

Books , Drink , Time , Reading