“You are not what you think you are; but what you think, you are.”

Norman Vincent Peale, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

“I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously, unless you keep in practice. Now, sir, we’ll talk if you like. I’ll tell you right out, I’m a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk.”

Kaspar Gutman, “the Fat Man”, in The Maltese Falcon

“No possible complexity which we can give to our picture of the universe can hide us from God… We read in Revelation of Him that sat on the throne ‘from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away.’ It may happen to any of us at any moment. In the twinkling of an eye, in a time to small to be measured, and in any place, all that seems to divide us from God can flee away, vanish, leaving us naked before Him, like the first man, like the only man, as if nothing but He and I existed. And since that contact cannot be avoided for long, and since it means either bliss or horror, the business of life is to learn to like it. That is the first and great commandment.”

C.S. Lewis God in the Dock

“Here at the ICA (the Institute for Confusing Acronyms)”

Here I yield shamelessly to the impulse to quote myself again, from Feb. 4 2003.

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.”

“Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish author” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail March 20, 2012

“What, gracious God, is man! that there should be such inconsistency and perfidiousness in his conduct?”

George Washington in George Washington: A Collection compiled and edited by W.B. Allen

“‘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 Read Let Freedom Reign

“many people get down on themselves because they’re overweight. Their attitude about being overweight doesn’t change anything. Instead, they could embrace the fact that they’ve been successful in producing a result called excess fat and that now they’re going to produce a new result called being thin. They would produce this new result by producing new actions.”

Anthony Robbins Unlimited Power