“He’s as tough as a 50 cent steak.” Golfing legend Lee Trevino on his long-time rival Raymond Floyd, quoted by an announcer on TSN April 7 1996

“It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” John Buchan

“History is philosophy, teaching by examples.” Dionysius Halicarnassus quoted by John Lukacs At the End of an Age (Lukacs adds “and Bolingbroke, nearly two thousand years later”).

“Each of us is interested in himself whether he wishes it or not, whether he thinks himself important or not, and for the simple reason that each of us is both the subject and the protagonist of his own nontransferable life.” José Ortega y Gasset in Man and Crisis, quoted in Leonard E. Read Let Freedom Reign

“Only a blockhead can fail to realize that our characters are the result of our conduct.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

“It is just as difficult to overcome success as it is to overcome failure.”

Sir William Walton

“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?”

Blaise Pascal Pensées

“But tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble’s soul; his heart was waterproof.”

Charles Dickens Oliver Twist