“I knew a wise man that had it for a by-word, when he saw men hasten to a conclusion, Stay a little, that we may make an end the sooner.”
Francis Bacon, Bacon’s Essays (edited with Introduction and Notes by F.G. Selby)
“’Your chief trouble,’ he [a mid-rank gangster to the narrator, Archie Goodwin] said, not offensively, ‘is that you think you’ve got a sense of humor. It confuses people, and you ought to get over it. Things strike you as funny.... but someday something that you think is funny will blow your g****m head right off your shoulders.’ Only after he had gone did it occur to me that that wouldn’t prove it wasn’t funny.”
Rex Stout In the Best Families
In my latest National Post column I object to politicians’ stream of petty dishonesty about anniversaries, events and rituals that numbs us to and implicates us in their constant deceit on big things as well.
“We have to realize that the child’s world is without economic purpose. A child doesn’t understand – happy ignorance – that people are paid to do things. To a child the policeman rules the street for self-important majesty; the furnace man stokes the furnace because he loves the noise of falling coal and the fun of getting dirty; the grocer is held to his counter by the lure of aromatic spices and the joy of giving. And in this very ignorance there is a grain of truth. The child’s economic world may be the one that we are reaching out in vain to find. Here is a path in the wood of economics that some day might be followed to new discovery. Meantime, the children know it well and gather beside it their flowers of beautiful illusion.”
“War-Time Santa Claus” in Stephen Leacock On the Front Line of Life
“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
Aldous Huxley, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail February 23, 2011
“More haste, less speed”
Pandar to Troilus in Chaucer Troilus and Criseyde (of course in the translation... by Gollum among others).
“The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Roman Converts” in Dublin Review, January/March 1925, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #8 (July/August 2001)