“Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be, if I may so put it, in love with death both individual and collective.”
Titus Livius (aka “Livy”) The Early History of Rome
“Can’t believe we don’t have world peace after changing the name on pancake boxes and syrup bottles.”
Unsourced gag in email from a friend May 15, 2022
“When a soldier complains of his hard life (or a laborer, etc.) try giving him nothing to do.”
Pascal Pensées
“Any man with a large mind ought to be able to write about anything.”
G.K. Chesterton in “What Is Right With The World” quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022
“As even a Murchison supporter conceded, it had ‘a total want of literary attractiveness.’”
Bill Bryson A Short History of Nearly Everything [re a book by geological writer Roderick Murchison that actually sold well despite its unreadabilty and high cost}.
“fairy land arouses [in the child] a longing for he knows not what.”
C.S. Lewis quoted by David W. Fagerberg in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 17 #1 (9-10/13)
“If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.”
La Rochefoucauld, quoted in Globe & Mail October 18, 1999
“People tell me they get depressed reading about the Middle East. Well, I get depressed writing about it. There’s supposed to be progress in human history, but the Middle East is moving backward.”
Leonard Stern in Ottawa Citizen January 17, 2009