“Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.”
C.S. Lewis
“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”
Henry David Thoreau
“The greatest deception, and the deepest source of unhappiness, is the illusion of finding life by excluding God, of finding freedom by excluding moral truths and personal responsibility.”
John Paul II at World Youth Day in 2002
“I felt like a half-digested meal eaten in a greasy-spoon joint.”
the internal monologue of narrator Philip Marlowe in Raymond Chandler The Long Goodbye
“Every sane man puts the cart before the horse. The cart is the important thing.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted in Gilbert Magazine July-August 2007
“Objects in history may be closer than they appear” “Eeyore for Vlad” on www.vladtepesblog.com 15/6/09
“My house, my car, my family may be a lot of responsibility, but I would rather take that responsibility than have any of you dating my wife or backing my car into phone poles or leaving your dirty socks on my bedroom floor. (Although when it comes to the kids, if any of you want to baby-sit for free, I’m willing to share.)” P.J. O’Rourke in Cato Policy Report July/August 2002
“Wherever formed, habit acts involuntarily, and without effort; and, it is only when you oppose it, that you find how powerful it has become…. The habit at first may seem to have no more strength than a spider’s web; but, once formed, it binds as with a chain of iron. The small events of life, taken singly, may seem exceedingly unimportant, like snow that falls silently, flake by flake; yet accumulated, these snow-flakes form the avalanche. Self-respect, self-help, application, industry, integrity – all are of the nature of habits, not beliefs…. as we grow older, a portion of our free activity and individuality becomes suspended in habit; our actions become of the nature of fate; and we are bound by the chains which we have woven around ourselves.” Samuel Smiles, Self-Help