In my latest National Post column I say the bizarre life of the late fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld reflects the emptiness of postmodernism all too well.
“Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.”
Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed (according to https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/194459.Maim_nides)
“Frederick Myers describes a conversation with her [George Eliot] in which, ‘taking as her text the words God, Immortality, Duty, she pronounced, with a terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how incredible the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third’…. It is quite normal now for people to go through life without an ultimate object, but to the Victorians it was new and daunting. No wonder so many of them were such odd fish – Kitchener, Rosebery, Salisbury, Dilke, Curzon, Carson, Randolph Churchill, Fisher, Rhodes, Milner. In many cases certitude was replaced by a streak of violence…”
Paul Johnson The Offshore Islanders
“You’re gonna miss the bus! Rise and shine, chia head!”/ “The wise crack of dawn.”
Two characters in the comic strip Grand Avenue in Ottawa Citizen April 7, 2003
“For Fools Admire, but Men of Sense Approve”
Alexander Pope “An Essay on Criticism” in Essay on Man and Other Poems
“I’m the guy who goes out in a rowboat after Moby Dick and brings along the tartar sauce.”
J.C. Watts of the Ottawa Rough Riders before the 1981 Grey Cup, quoted in Ottawa Citizen Dec. 20, 1998
“The modern artist, only too often, loses himself in seeking to find and fix himself; he imposes a fictitious self upon that unthinking real self which otherwise would be expressed freely. He has become an individualist, and ceased to be an individual. Nay, he has even become a madman in the most frightful and vivid meaning of the term. He has become conscious of his subconsciousness.”
G.K. Chesterton, “The Mirror,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“This is a pleasant surprise, Archie. I would not have believed it. That of course is the advantage of being a pessimist; a pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.”
Nero Wolfe to Archie Goodwin in Rex Stout Fer de Lance