"The king [Hrolf, to Bodvar] said, 'I knew when you came here that few would be your equal, but it seems to me that your finest achievement is that you have made Hott into another champion. He was previously thought to be a man in whom there was little probability of much luck.'"
The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki
"Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare it is simply disgraceful."
Aldous Huxley, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe and Mail July 8, 2004
"I have always felt myself to be a stranger here on earth, aware that our home is elsewhere."
Malcolm Muggeridge in 1988, quoted in Joseph Pearce Literary Converts
"the one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God’s paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle – and not lose it."
G.K. Chesterton "Time’s Abstract and Brief Chronicle" according to Dale Ahlquist. It was paraphrased by Kara Kelley in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #5 (March-April 2005) as "The most romantic thing in the world is to fight a losing battle, and not lose." Which is almost the only case I know of where somebody rephrased Chesterton and may have improved him.
"The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell."
Zora Hurston, quoted in Elie Nasrallah Hostage to History
"All purposeful human action is self-interested, in the crucial sense that it aims at goals accepted by the individual, using means evaluated by the individual. Greed or selfishness, by contrast, is a matter of claiming for the self more than is due."
Paul Heyne "The Concept of Economic Justice in Religious Discussion"
"No matter how bad things are, you have to remember, either you get killed or you don’t. The rest is just psychology."
His father on living through the Blitz, quoted by David Warren in Ottawa Citizen October 21, 2001