"Know Thyself"

The inscription on the temple at Delphi "ascribed to Apollo himself" according to Juvenal

“He that is not handsome at 20, nor strong at 30, nor rich at 40, nor wise at 50, will never be handsome, strong, rich or wise."

George Herbert "three centuries ago" quoted by Terry O’Neill in British Columbia Report May 18, 1998

"an open mind, to be sure, should be open at both ends, like the foodpipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake."

Northrop Frye The Great Code

"Of course, like Nietzsche, the most famous of God’s assassins, he [Ivan Karamazov] ends in madness. But this is a risk worth running, and, faced with such tragic ends, the essential impulse of the absurd mind is to ask: 'What does that prove?'"

Camus "Absurd Creation" in The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays

 "There is no significance to the sound and fury of his [man’s] life, as of a stage tragedy, unless something is being affirmed by the complete action."

Richard Weaver Ideas Have Consequences p. 20.

"A good leader never walks by a mistake."

An “oft-repeated maxim” of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, according to Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, Stormin’ Norman

"I am put in mind of a little book, titled Manners, that my own grandmother gave me as a child…. printed in 1912…. which I have sadly misplaced… good for a laugh when I was a teenager…. It was a noble little book, as I came to see later…. Implicit within every statement in the book was a conception of civilization, an aspiration to raise ourselves up. Not simply to ‘get ahead,’ but to rise out of the slovenly condition of being barbaric."

David Warren in Ottawa Citizen April 9, 2002 [reflecting on Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother]