Re the title character, a dog, doing things like hunting, fighting, being full, lying in the sun etc. “They were expressions of life, and life is always happy when it is expressing itself.”
Jack London White Fang
“I think that, as life is passion and action, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.”
“U.S. judge, and Civil War veteran, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.” quoted by Christie Blatchford in Globe & Mail July 7, 2006 [filing from Kandahar, Afghanistan]
“Empty heads have long tongues.”
Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts
“On limited lines I was making progress, but the wings of imagination still drooped nervelessly at my sides.”
Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands
“Better late than early”
From a list of maxims submitted by a Grade 3 Calgary Montessori School class, in Globe & Mail November 29, 2001
“Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.”
Max Beerbohm quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #5 (March 2006)
“people often ask me, well don’t you have faith in anything? And I always have the same answer, I do have one unshakable [faith], and that is I have an unshakable [faith] in the unreliability of man. I know that no matter what we do, some damn fool will make a mess of it.”
Garrett Hardin, quoted in Julian Simon Hoodwinking the Nation
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
John Milton, quoted in the introduction to the fence-whitewashing excerpt from Mark Twain Tom Sawyer in William Bennett The Book of Virtues