Something Beautiful

Healing through goodness

Some patients, though conscious that their condition is perilous, recover their health simply through their contentment with the goodness of the physician. --     Hippocrates (460-400 B.C.)

Obscure heroes

"For man’s greatest actions are performed in minor struggles. Life, misfortune, isolation, abandonment and poverty are battlefields which have their heroes - obscure heroes who are at times greater than illustrious heroes." - Victor Hugo

Abbey

Abbaye de Fontevraud.

Effigies.

Conques

Let us away to the abbey church of Conques, France.  In addition to the introductory page, there are six more pages of photos, as follows --

        page 2, 
        page 3, 
        page 4, 
        page 5, 
        page 6,  and
        page 7. 

Of these, the finest is surely page 4, with its close-ups of the tympanum.   

Hummingbirds, flowers

Some hummingbirds, a couple of flowers. So beautiful.

Words

I don't know that this exactly belongs in this blog, but I like it very much and I need a place to record it, so here goes . . . .

Q:  What comes after primary, secondary, tertiary?

A: The sequence continues with quaternary, quinary.   After that, it continues even further with senary, septenary,   octonary, nonary, and denary. Words also exist for `twelfth order' (duodenary) and   `twentieth order' (vigenary).

(With thanks to Ask Oxford)

The Ten Precepts

I don't know what the status of these Ten Precepts is, but I like them.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk

Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) (More to come, I hope.)

What to do

 

Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that.

 

-- Harold Thurman Whitman

John McGahern

Excerpt from John McGahern's new Memoir. 

My own experience of Ireland is embodied in this paragraph --

I am sure it is from those days that I take the belief that the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.