The Intellectual Life, #5

The following advice from Sertillanges is good for all, but especially good for the self-conscious rhetorician:

This perverse world loves, at bottom, only saints; this cowardly world dreams of heroes; Roger Bontemps [An easy-living, happy-go-lucky person] grows grave when he sees an ascetic. In such a world you must not yield to public opinion and write as if humanity were looking over your shoulder. You must shake yourself free of other people, as well as yourself. In the intellectual domain as in every other, to rise above man is to prepare wondrous things, for it is opening the way to the Spirit.