If you can keep your wits about you while all others are losing theirs, and blaming you. The world will be yours and everything in it, what's more, you'll be a man, my son.
A new thing I've been doing is just making sure I clear off my desk and try to only touch a piece of paper once, so I get the mail, open it up, deal with it then. My son's homework, or what I get from his teachers, the same way. That way, it's not nagging me, things to add to my to-do list.
Wicked sons do not have the Holy Ghost in the same way as do beloved sons, and yet they do have Baptism. So, too, heretics do not have the Church as Catholics have, even though they have Baptism.
Oh, blank confusion! true epitome Of what the mighty City is herself, To thousands upon thousands of her sons, Living amid the same perpetual whirl Of trivial objects, melted and reduced To one identity.
You are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can can play the 'Gloria'? No, not Bach's 'Gloria.' Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.
Boyhood is a most complex and incomprehensible thing. Even when one has been through it, one does not understand what it was. A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.
A mightier love for the Son of God, to overpower and subdue and lead captive these wayward and truant affections of the natural heart - this is what is needed.
So hand in hand they passed, the loveliest pair that ever since in love's embraces met -- Adam, the goodliest man of men since born his sons; the fairest of her daughters Eve.