"The traveller sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see."

G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Robert Moore-Jumonville in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 15 #1 (September 2011) 

"Science is a first-rate piece of furniture for a man’s upper chamber if he has common sense on the ground floor."

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., "The Poet at the Breakfast-Table", quoted in Daniel Boorstin Cleopatra's Nose

"Learn your lines and don’t trip over the furniture."

Spencer Tracy's advice to young actors, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go

"I’m creative, but somehow I lack the talent to go with it."

 Lily Tomlin, Search for Signs of Intelligent Life, quoted in The New Republic Oct. 7, 1991

In my latest National Post column I dismiss various criticisms and call Prince Harry's engagement to Meghan Markle a good thing including the amazing progress in race relations it reflects.

"When you sweep the floor, just sweep; when you eat, just eat; when you walk, just walk."

"the pilgrim-poet Basho" quoted by Robert Sibley in Ottawa Citizen Nov. 19, 2000

"To suppose that this universe came into existence, with you and me in it, in order that we might, in Shakespeare’s felicitous phrase, 'grind out our appetites', is not only to demean life, but to make it farcical as well."

Malcolm Muggeridge, "Address, 1970" in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge

"They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the stair-case and was viscid under the foot like organic matter."

O. Henry in “The Furnished Room”