“He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.”
Goethe, quoted on the flyleaf of Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy.
“Start every day with a smile and get it over with.”
W.C. Fields, quoted in the features on a DVD of six classic W.C. Fields shorts I acquired years ago
“Of what use is a dream if not a blueprint for courageous action?”
Bruce Wayne in Batman (the 1966 movie)
“[D]o not men die fast enough, without destroying each other?"
Francois de Salignac, The Adventures of Telemachus, the Son of Ulysses
In the National Post I condemn Mark Zuckerberg’s clueless call for global censorship in response to ugly behaviour online.
“‘I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism. – Roberto Rossellini; 1906-1977”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2238066-i-am-not-a-pessimist-to-perceive-evil-where-it
“Belief is favourable to the human mind, were it for nothing else but to furnish it entertainment. An infidel I should think, must frequently suffer from ennui. It was perhaps affectation in Socrates to say, that all he had learned to know was that he knew nothing. But surely it is a mark of wisdom, to be sensible of the limited extent of human knowledge, and to examine with reverence the ways of GOD, nor presumptuously reject any opinion which has been held by the judicious and the learned, because it has been made a cloak for artifice, or had a variety of fictions raised on it, by credulity.”
James Boswell, Esq. The Journal of a Tour To Corsica; & Memoirs of Pascal Paoli