“Concerning aesthetic values, I always felt the world cannot fall apart as long as free men see the rainbow, feel the rain, and hear the laugh of a child.”
Frank Capra The Name Above the Title
“Misfortune is a point of view. Your headache may feel good to an aspirin salesman.”
Tony Robbins Unlimited Power
“‘I’m not saying there is no God. I’m just not religious.’ How curious that the Lord of the Universe might exist, yet not be important enough to think about.”
J. Budziszewski “Underground Thomist” email “Reading an Empty Book” March 24, 2019
“But really, Marilla, one can’t stay sad very long in such an interesting world, can one?”
Anne in Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
“Of the things that frighten us, the fear of being left out of the flow of human interaction is certainly one of the worst… In many preliterate cultures solitude is thought to be so intolerable that a person makes a great effort never to be alone; only witches and shamans feel comfortable spending time by themselves…. The Latin locution for ‘being alive’ was inter hominem esse, which literally meant ‘to be among men’; whereas ‘to be dead’ was inter hominem esse desinere, or ‘to cease to be among men.’”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
“Vilfredo Pareto… developed a logarithmic pattern that demonstrated that, typically, only 20 per cent of people controlled 80 per cent of a country’s wealth. Later, American economist Max Lorenz observed that Pareto’s principle, often called the 80/20 rule, could be applied broadly to other areas, such as productivity (20 per cent of employees do 80 per cent of the work) and machinery management (20 per cent of machines are responsible for 80 per cent of breakdowns).”
Marnie Ko in Western Standard September 27, 2004
In my latest National Post column I express gratitude for all the things that make me happy normally and are now helping me through the quarantine including (my life is so interesting words may fail you here) a brilliantly designed new power bar protecting my vital computer lifeline to the world.