“Apart from the religious vision, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.” Alfred North Whitehead, quoted by William Barrett The Illusion of Technique

“No one can be really hilarious but the serious man. The thing called high spirits is possible only to the spiritual. Ultimately a man cannot rejoice in anything except the nature of things. Ultimately a man can enjoy nothing but religion.” G.K. Chesterton in Heretics, quoted in Gilbert! Vol. 4 # 4

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” Friedrich Nietzsche

“The accuser is the primary role of Satan in the Bible, and so Byron was very accurate when he refers to history, the record of what man has done, as ‘the devil’s scripture.’” Northrop Frye The Great Code

“But the temptation to cosmic justice is derailed by the call for economic hygiene.” William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review December 6 1999

“We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.” Aristotle

“Everything can be taken away from man but one thing – to choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one’s way.” Viktor Frankl, who managed to write Man’s Search for Meaning while in Dachau and Auschwitz

“The fundamental question to be asked about any theological statement is, ‘What is the evidence that makes you think this might be true?’” John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist