“Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.”
Søren Kierkegaard, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen To Go
“It is often observed that it is human nature to dislike those whom we have injured…”
David Frum Dead Right
“It is not only that man wants to be free; it is that he must have pride in his work and be fairly recompensed for its value – or sooner rather than later he will simply cease to be productive no matter what pressures are applied to make him work.”
Thibaut de Saint Phalle, Trade, Inflation, and the Dollar
“Napoleon had everything men usually crave – glory, power, riches – yet he said at St Helena: ‘I have never known six happy days in my life’; while Helen Keller – blind, deaf, dumb – declared, ‘I have found life so beautiful.’ If half a century of living has taught me anything at all, it has taught me that ‘Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.’”
Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“No one of his Cabinet really understood Lincoln. He was constantly scandalizing them by his calm disregard of convention, and his seemingly prodigal waste of time. The friends and advisers of Jesus were similarly shocked. How could any one with such important business allow himself to be so casually interrupted! One of the surest marks of greatness, of course, is accessibility and the appearance of having an unstinted allowance of time. ‘Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality,’ says Stevenson. The disciples were extremely busy, Judas most of all.”
Bruce Barton The Man Nobody Knows
“The [French] Revolution appealed to the idea of an abstract and eternal justice, beyond all local custom or convenience. If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man. Here Burke made his brilliant diversion… the modern argument of scientific relativity; in short, the argument of evolution. He suggested that humanity was everywhere molded by or fitted to its environment and institutions; in fact, that each people practically got, not only the tyrant it deserved, but the tyrant it ought to have. ‘I know nothing of the rights of men,’ he said, ‘but I know something of the rights of Englishmen.’ There you have the essential atheist.”
G.K. Chesterton What’s Wrong with the World
“As for Gussie Fink-Nottle, many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance and started embalming on sight.”
P.G. Wodehouse, quoted by Joseph Bottum in First Things #156 (October 2005)
“Do you know that disease and death must needs overtake us, no matter what we are doing?... What do you wish to be doing when it overtakes you?... If you have anything better to be doing when you are overtaken, get to work on that.”
Epictetus, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen To Go