"With God dead, there remains only history and power."
“Helen’s Exile” in Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays
"the mortadella of philosophers. Little globules of rich, fatty thinking, in vast quantities of baloney."
P.J. O'Rourke on Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted by Noah Richler in National Post December 6, 2001
"if there is any permanent element in him [man generally], his conscience in all probability cannot be destroyed, although it can be covered up and disregarded. To tamper with it, therefore, to try to destroy it, is of all conceivable courses of conduct the most dangerous, and may prepare the way to a wakening, a self-assurance, of conscience fearful to think of. But suppose that the fungus theory is the true one. Suppose that man is a mere passing shadow, and nothing else. What is he to say of his conscience? Surely a rational man holding such a theory of his own nature will be bound in consistency to try and to determine the question whether he ought not to prune his conscience just as he cuts his hair and nails. A man who regarded a cold heart and a good digestion as the best possible provision for life would have a great deal to say for his view.”
James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty Equality Fraternity
"If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man."
G.K. Chesterton in “The Empire of the Insect” in What’s Wrong with the World, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 12 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2009).
“She stopped. It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.”
The internal monologue of the heroine, Mma Precious Ramotswe, in Alexander McCall Smith The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
“That’s true enough, but we must go and work in the garden.”
Candide (when reminded by Pangloss that all is for the best) in Voltaire Candide
“we have lost a vision of man. We are not sure how different he actually is from animal or vegetable or rock or mineral. It is partly, I think, because we have ceased trying to relate ourselves to God: we no longer even cry that God is dead; instead, we have named him an hypothesis, a dream, and turned him over to the laboratory to ‘prove.’ And because we have stopped searching for God we have stopped searching for ultimate meaning, saying there is no purpose in human existence. Hence all is absurdity, all is nothing. The more honest among those who want God ‘proved’ tend to seek uneasy solace in neo-nihilism; or, putting heart above logic, in humanism - while the less honest settle for their own brand of idol worship, sacrificing all to success or skin color or capitalism or communism or their work or their pleasure, whispering, Let’s don’t think about it.”
Lillian Smith Killers of the Dream