An hour later, going back to my hotel, I ran into a peasant woman with a nursing baby. She was a young woman, and the baby was about six weeks old. And the baby smiled at her, as far as she’d noticed, for the first time since it was born. I saw her suddenly cross herself very, very piously. ‘What is it, young woman?’ I say. (I was asking questions all the time then.) . ‘It’s just that a mother rejoices,’ she says, ‘when she notices her baby’s first smile, the same as God rejoices each time he looks down from heaven and sees a sinner standing before him and praying with all his heart.’ The woman said that to me, in almost those words, and it was a deep, such a subtle and truly religious thought, a thought that all at once expressed the whole essence of Christianity, that is, the whole idea of God as our own father, and that God rejoices over man as a father over his own child – the main thought of Christ! A simple peasant woman!

Dostoevsky, The Idiot tr. Pevear & Volokhonsky, 2001.

Natural reason is sufficiently powerful and trustworthy when it operates within its proper sphere, but it is too weak to provide much illumination in the arena of natural theology and it is downright unreliable when used to pass judgment on the first principles of revealed theology. To be sure, philosophical inquiry unaided by divine revelation can help foster logical skills and intellectual habits that are required for the articulation of true wisdom within Christian theology; it can even provide Christian thinkers with new and useful conceptual resources. But it cannot on its own make any noteworthy progess toward providing us with the substance of absolute wisdom.

Freddoso, Ockham on Faith and Reason §

The differences of opinion between Isocrates and Plato, as between the elite political theory and mass ideology, were not over whether the state and its intstitutions should be a reflection of moral good. The disputes rather concerned how the good should be defined, who was capable of achieving goodness, and whether goodness could be taught.

Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, 160-1.

Tedium is the granddaughter of despondency, and the daughter of slothfulness. In order to drive it away, labor at your work, and do not be slothful in prayer. The tedium will pass, and zeal will come. And if to this you add patience and humility, then you will be rid of all misfortunes and evils.

St. Ambrose of Optina