“My dad wasn’t lazy, he just had a genius for not considering the future.”
Audie Murphy, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, Heroes of World War II
“The best way out is always through.”
Robert Frost, widely cited online (and in fact it turns out to be from the rather bleak poem "A Servant to Servants" https://www.poetryverse.com/robert-frost-poems/a-servant-to-servants)
“there are aspects of our experience which hint at an incompleteness in what we are and that encourage the expectation of a fulfilment whose ground could only be in something or someone other than ourselves. Peter Berger has drawn our attention to ‘signals of transcendence’ found in every life: (a) an argument from order (essentially the intuition that history is not a tale told by an idiot; the parental role of comforting a frightened child is not the acting of a loving lie); (b) an argument from play (cheerfulness, not to say joy, keeps breaking in); (c) an argument from hope (something is held to lie in the future which is necessary to the completion of the present); (d) an argument from damnation (our outrage at Hitler and Stalin is an intuition of the transcendent moral seriousness of the world); (e) an argument from humour (there is a perceived incongruity in our experience which ‘reflects the imprisonment of the human spirit in the world’). I would want to add to these an argument from mathematics. The nature of that subject is a hotly disputed philosophical question, but for many of its practitioners its pursuit has the character of discovery rather than construction. They would agree with St Augustine that ‘men do not criticise it like examiners but rejoice in it like discoverers’. Here is the intimation of an independent world of everlasting truth which we are able to explore.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“A radioactive isotope of tedium.”
Another of my own, from February 2, 2004, on reading an exceptionally dull column.
“Man is born ridiculous, as can easily be seen if you look at him soon after he is born.”
G.K. Chesterton, “Shaw, The Philosopher,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“No man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.”
“Th. B. Macaulay, History of England” quoted in Burton Malkiel A Random Walk Down Wall Street
“What next? Economists divided on the future”
Subject line of an MSNBC teaser email whose body said “If you're confused about the outlook for the economy and stocks one year after the market hit bottom, then you've got good company — the Wall Street economists and strategists who are supposed to have this all figured out.” (The actual date, if you care, was March 7, 2010 but just as some words of wisdom are eternal, so are some fatuities.)
“Can’t is the father of feeble endeavor,/ The parent of terror and halfhearted work….”
Edgar Guest, “Can’t,” in William Bennett The Book of Virtues