While it is a most human to desire the ideal, seek the best, and have the highest goals, all human lives suffer damages and require rebuilding. The unfaithful husband or wife, the deaths and illnesses in a family, the rebellion of the prodigal son or daughter, the loss of income or work all inflict destruction of some kind that forces another beginning, a fresh approach, a new idea, or the exercise of a heroic virtue.

The children of the Hollywood producer will never need to work a day in their lives. They can have anything they want; or more specifically, they can have anything their super wealthy dad is willing to buy for them. Ordinary families tell their children that they cannot have everything simply due to lack of money. For the super wealthy, that's just not true.

As the freshness of childhood and the exuberance of youth fade, and life assumes a regularity and familiarity, it is all too easy to become jaded and blasé. Instead of ...

While everyone has heard of King Midas’s avarice and his desire for The Golden Touch that transforms everything he touches into gold, not everyone has heard of The Leaden Touch. In Hawthorne’s A Wonder Book one of the children who hears of the famous story about King Midas, remarks, “But some people have what we may call ‘The Leaden Touch,’ and make everything dull and heavy that they lay their fingers upon.”

Catholic parents seeks to shelter their children in their youth, so that they may grow in wisdom and holiness without constant battering from the world. But once they are grown and educated, these children no longer need shelter. They are able to take what they have learned and engage the world without fear.

Every human being experiences the conflict between duty and pleasure, what a person wishes to do for enjoyment and what a person ought to do by way of obligation. These two tendencies often appear as contrary, irreconcilable powers that inevitably clash and produce resentment or frustration.

Two great ancient philosophers, Marcus Aurelius in Meditations and Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy — two works renowned for their great wisdom and moral power — teach the importance of the virtue of self-possession. Both writers observe that no persons can control the outside events that surround them.

When I was four years old and living in the Philippines, there was an elderly man who would come around our street once or twice a month to beg for food. He was ill and had a difficult time speaking. Nobody in the neighborhood seemed to know his name. Every time he came, my Lolo, or grandfather, greeted him with a hearty "Hello My Friend!" From then on, all of us children called him "My Friend".

This analytical essay has been available as a help to those 11th grade students, serving both as introduction and beginner’s analysis.. Chesterton’s epic is certainly his greatest poetic work...

In the folk tale, five brothers all choose their profession and perform their work with success and prosperity: a brick maker, a mason, an architect, an innovator, and a critic. However, only the oldest brother unites vocation and avocation, and only his work has effects for the future and for heaven.

In the story the merchant’s son who wasted his money finds himself in desperate circumstances until a friend gives him a magical flying trunk. When he flies with it and descends from the sky, he introduces himself as a Turkish god who has come from above to marry the king’s daughter. Honored with this privilege, the king gladly agrees to the marriage: “Yes, you shall certainly marry our daughter.”

To be human is to be born with desires, to have wishes, and to experience longings. But not all wishes have the same quality, nature, or origin. Some wishes assume the shape of daydreams or fantasies as utopian visions enter the mind and people imagine impossibilities.

Man by nature is idealistic, seeks excellence, and hopes for perfection, but he is bound by the weakness of human nature and the limits of the human condition. There is no such being as a faultless painter or a sinless human being. In the sport of baseball every player aspires to get a hit every time and bat 1.000, but even the best of batters only have an average of .300.

I was asked to write an essay about the book that had most changed my life. This book was my answer. Relating the account of Denton’s ordeal as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for nearly eight years, it is clear that his struggle to practice his faith and keep his sanity during this time were beyond heroic.

According to proverbial wisdom, “When you do succeed, the chances are that you were not trying too hard in the first place.” This observation appears to contradict the idea of ...

Ten years ago, our family embarked on a journey which entailed leaving our comfortable life in Northern Virginia to live a life of simplicity in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. And ...

by Pius XI | The proper and immediate aim of Christian education is to cooperate with divine grace in forming the true and perfect Christian… For the true Christian must live a supernatural life in Christ and display it in all his actions. For precisely this reason, Christian education takes in the whole of human life, physical and spiritual, intellectual and moral, individual, domestic, and social.

The ancient Greeks identified the sign of fruitfulness as proof of the art of living well, as the true mark of civilization. On the shield of Achilles in the Iliad ...

To be human is to think of the future, to imagine the unknown, and to fear the unpredictable. So many things are not in the control of human beings who ...

In O. Henry’s short story “The Social Triangle,”  Ikey Snigglefritz, a simple tailor’s apprentice, receives his week’s wages and on his way home enters the Café Maginnis. There he accidentally ...