“The greatest misfortune of all is not to be able to bear misfortune.”
Bias, a Greek philosopher, around 570 BC
“Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world.”
Lily Tomlin
“The sceptics have no philosophy of life because they have no philosophy of death.”
G.K. Chesterton in English Life October 1924, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #7 (June 2008)
“Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.”
Mark Twain, “Notebook, published posthumously, 1935” in Joseph R. Conlin, ed., The Morrow Book of Quotations in American History
“Life doesn’t wait to be asked: it comes grinning in, sits down uninvited and helps itself to bread and cheese, and comments uninhibitedly on the decorations.” Philip Larkin
Barbarism is “the destruction of all that men have ever understood, by men who do not understand it.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News August 5, 1933, quoted in Gilbert! Vol. 6 #1 (September 2002)
“The true cost of something is what you give up to get it”
The definition of “opportunity cost” at www.economist.com/research/Economics/, quoted by Jason Clemens and Niels Veldhuis in Fraser Forum March 2006
“he [Samuel Johnson] never thought he was right without being ready to give battle; he never thought he was wrong without being ready to ask pardon.”
G.K. Chesterton “The Real Dr. Johnson”