"When Danish dramatist and poet Baron Ludwig Holbert (1684-1754) was asked by a scoffer 'Do you call that thing on your head a hat?' he replied: 'Do you call that thing under your hat a head?'"
"Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe and Mail November 17, 2003 p. A14.
"'Don’t you swelter all day in the sun?’ Epictetus asked rhetorically [comparing watching the logistically nightmarish ancient Olympic games to life generally]. 'Aren’t you jammed in with the crowds? Isn’t it hard to get a bath? Aren’t you soaked to the bone whenever it rains? Don’t the din and the shouting and the petty annoyances drive you completely mad? But of course you put up with it all because it’s an unforgettable spectacle.'"
Tony Perrottet, author of The Naked Olympics, in Ottawa Citizen July 17, 2004
In my latest National Post column I say the Prime Minister's insistence on the Newspeak term "peoplekind" was neither a joke nor innocent.
"Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; wisdom is humble that he does not know more."
William Cowper
"Of course we are lone survivors, of course the past that is our lives is at the bottom of an abyss - if the abyss has any bottom; of course, too, there’s no use talking unless one particularly wants to. But... one can, strange to say, still want to - ... You see I still, in presence of life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions - as many as possible..."
Henry James in a letter to Henry Adams near end of both their lives, quoted in The New Republic October 16, 1989
"Knowledge comes by taking things apart. But wisdom comes by putting things together."
John A. Morrison, quoted as an "Apercus du jour” in "Social Studies" in Globe and Mail May 20, 2008
“Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.”
D.P. Diffiné, “The 1993 American Incentive System Almanac”
“If ever God is banished from the world so that even His image is eradicated from the human mind, we will cease to be human and become merely very clever animals—and our ultimate fate will be too horrible to contemplate."
Father Karl Rahner, SJ, quoted by Paul Johnson in “The human race: success or failure?” in The New Criterion Vol. 25 (Nov. 2006)