“Philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere. Where, then, are we going? Always to our home.” Novalis, Fragments

“Wit is the key, I think, to anybody’s heart. Show me the person who doesn’t like to laugh and I’ll show you a person with a toe tag.” Julia Roberts

“nearly all things not evil are better in experience than in theory.” Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #1 (Sept. 1999)

“The record of human cruelty and folly is too hideous for anything but the sense of a corrupted will to come near to a diagnosis.”

Northrop Frye The Great Code

“Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.” – Henry Hazlitt Economics in One Lesson

“I am not ashamed, as they are, to say I do not know what I do not know.”

Cicero, quoted in Pascal’s Pensées centuries before Donald Rumsfeld was widely derided for making the same point.

“As for your kids, they’ll probably be fine, even if you skip that parenting course. That is, if you dare to have kids at all. But if you believed the experts, who would?” Margaret Wente in Globe and Mail Oct. 19 1999.

“From amid the press of ruddy busy Life, the Pale Messenger beckons silently: wide-spreading interests, projects, salvation of French Monarchies, what thing soever man has on hand, he must suddenly quit it all and go. Wert thou saving French Monarchies; wert thou blacking shoes on the Pont Neuf.”

Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution (on the untimely death of the Comte de Mirabeau from exhaustion)