“Now if you shoulder your pole and line, march to the ditches and gullies, and watch for minnows and perch, then you’ll have a hard time ever landing a big fish.”

Chuang Tzu in Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings

“Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers, why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry, or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too. Half of earth’s gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become. For all its rooted loveliness, the world has no continuing city here; it is an outlandish place, a foreign home, a session in via to a better version of itself – and it is our glory to see it so and thirst until Jerusalem comes home at last. We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great. That is the unconsolable heartburn, the lifelong disquietude of having been made in the image of God. All man’s love is vast and inconvenient. It is tempting, of course, to blunt its edge by caution…. First of all, such faintness is unworthy of true men…. second, last and most important, playing it safe is not Divine…. Love is the widest, choicest door into the Passion. God saved the world not by sitting up in heaven and issuing antiseptic directives, but by becoming man, and vulnerable, in Jesus. He died, not because He despised the earth, but because He loved it as a man loves it – out of all proportion and sense. And when He rose again, He stood up like a man indeed: with glorious scars – and with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfectibility of man’s nature…. He will, at the last day, change these corruptible bodies of ours, make them like His own glorious Body and, through them, draw all things into the last city of their being…. It is, I grant you, an incautious and extravagant hope. But in such a place as this – in a world that so regularly winds our clocks and breaks our hearts, that laughs at caution and cries from every corner for extravagation – only outlandish hopes can make themselves at home.”

Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb

“The purpose of Satire, it has been rightly said, is to strip off the veneer of comforting illusion and cozy half-truth – and our job, as I see it, is to put it back again.”

Michael Flanders introducing Flanders and Swann At the Drop if Another Hat

“most arguments are not about what is true, but about what is important if it is true.”

G.K. Chesterton

“To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?”

Cicero

“This is not philosophy. It is not utopia. This is the evidence of the last hundred years. Societies that are open, that have popular checks on authority, that are based on rules and respect, are those that prosper. Societies that are paternalistic, that foster suspicion and cynicism, that breed the contempt of citizens, that tolerate corruption, that crush dissent and focus on the benefits of the few at the expense of the many... they are the ones that fail.” Rt. Hon. Jean Chrétien

“Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.”

Francis Bacon

“When you’re betting for tiles in an archery contest, you shoot with skill. When you’re betting for fancy belt buckles, you worry about your aim. And when you’re betting for real gold, you’re a nervous wreck. Your skill is the same in all three cases – but because one prize means more to you than another, you let outside considerations weigh on your mind. He who looks too hard at the outside gets clumsy on the inside.”

Confucius in Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings