“Beyond each corner a number of new directions lie in wait.” Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
“We – or at least I – shall not be able to adore God on the highest occasions if we have learned no habit of doing so on the lowest. At best, our faith and reason will tell us that He is adorable, but we shall not have found Him so, not have ‘tasted and seen.’ Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.” C.S. Lewis Letters to Malcolm
“Do not dress words up by adding ly to them, as though putting a hat on a horse.” Wm. Strunk Jr. & E.B. White, The Elements of Style
“I once gave a speech I called ‘Gazing at Stars and Patting Cats.’ Its theme was that in order to live with equanimity and hope, to experience awe, wonder and joy, and to deal with our tragedies, despairs, and sorrows, we humans need to have one hand patting an animal or in the earth, and the other reaching out to the stars, to the universe.”
Margaret Somerville The Ethical Imagination
“If, then, the burden of history can weigh this heavily upon the present and the future, then surely part of the historian’s task is to try to lift that burden: to show that, because most forms of oppression have been constructed, they can be deconstructed; to demonstrate that what is was not always so in the past and therefore need not be so in the future. The historian must be, in this sense, a social critic; for it’s by means of such criticism that the past liberates even as it oppresses the present and the future – very much as the historian, however paradoxically, simultaneously performs both acts upon the past itself.”
John Lewis Gaddis The Landscape of History
“The market is ‘heartless.’ So are clocks and yardsticks. Saying that economic problems are the result of the free market’s failure is like gaining twenty pounds and calling the bathroom scale a bum.”
P.J. O’Rourke Eat the Rich
“The measure of a man’s character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.” Thomas Babington
“Allah will smile on you.” “More likely he will laugh at me.” Exchange between a merchant and Sindbad right after they make a deal, in The Golden Voyage of Sindbad