Quote of the Day (St. Francis de Sales, on Patience)

“Do not limit your patience to this or that kind of injury and affliction. Extend it universally to all such as those God pleases to send you or let it happen to you. Some men wish to suffer no tribulations except those connected with honor, for example, or to be wounded or made a prisoner in war, persecuted for religion, or impoverished by some lawsuit they win. Such people do not love tribulation but the honor that goes with it. The truly patient man and true servant of God bears up equally under tribulations accompanied by ignominy and those that bring honor.”—St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), Bishop of Geneva and Doctor of the Church, Introduction to the Devout Life, translated by John K. Ryan (1609)

Quote of the Day (Leo Tolstoy, on the ‘Strongest of All Warriors’)

“The strongest of all warriors are these two — Time and Patience.”― Russian novelist Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), War and Peace (1867)

Quote of the Day (Adlai Stevenson, on a Wise Man and History)

“A wise man does not try to hurry history. Many wars have been avoided by patience, and many have been precipitated by reckless haste.”—Adlai Stevenson, Speeches of Adlai Stevenson (1952)

Both Stevenson and the man who defeated him twice for the Presidency, Dwight Eisenhower, were sober statesmen who, whatever their failings, exhibited caution near the start of the perilous Cold War. 

The same cannot be said for the current occupant of the Oval Office, who, over the past year, has escalated an already fraught situation with North Korea into one more reminiscent of schoolyard taunting and sessions on a psychiatrist’s couch.

This President knows neither patience nor history. His office and his country have already suffered for this knowledge and character deficit. The question now is whether the world will.

Quote of the Day (William Cowper, on Our Cross—and God’s)

“Let me not angrily declare

No pain was ever sharp like mine,

Nor murmur at the cross I bear,

But rather weep, remembering Thine.”— English poet-hymnist William Cowper (1731-1800), “Prayer for Patience,” in William Cowper's Olney Hymns and Other Sacred Works, compiled by Charles J. Doe (2010)

Quote of the Day (St. Ignatius of Loyola, on Desolation and Patience)

“Let him who is in desolation strive to remain in patience, a virtue contrary to the troubles which harass him; and let him think that he will shortly be consoled, using all endeavors against the desolation in the way explained in the sixth rule.”— St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), The Spiritual Exercises: Rules for the Discernment of Spirits (Fourth Edition Revised)