"If you make an ass out of yourself, there’ll always be someone ready to ride you. Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory."
Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts
"There’s no such thing as a bad day when there’s a doorknob on the inside of the door".
Paul Galanti, former Navy Commander and Vietnam War POW, quoted in National Post March 24, 2003
"To suppose that this universe came into existence, with you and me in it, in order that we might, in Shakespeare’s felicitous phrase, 'grind out our appetites', is not only to demean life, but to make it farcical as well."
Malcolm Muggeridge, "Address, 1970" in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge
"They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the stair-case and was viscid under the foot like organic matter."
O. Henry in “The Furnished Room”
"The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want."
Ben Stein, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe and Mail May 8, 2007
"Modern conditions are treated as fixed, though the very word 'modern' implies that they are fugitive. Old Ideas are treated as impossible, though their very antiquity often proves their permanence."
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 No. 2 (Oct.-Nov. 2000)
"the real difference between man and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, just and unjust, etc. It is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a household and a state."
Aristotle, The Politics p. 60
"Be wiser than other people if you can, but do not tell them so."
Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773), quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe and Mail August 31, 2005