“There is nothing wrong with making mistakes. Just don’t respond with encores.”

“Anonymous”, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail December 26, 2012

“Nearly all the most awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable, from ‘A child is born’ to ‘A soul is damned.’ If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?… Only the mass of men, for instance, have authority to say whether life is good. Whether life is good is an especially mystical and delicate question, and, like all such questions, is asked in words of one syllable. It is also answered in words of one syllable, and Bernard Shaw (as also mankind) answers ‘yes.’”

G.K. Chesterton, “Shaw, The Philosopher,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton

“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure: It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”

Oscar Wilde quoted in Filip Palda The History of Tobacco Regulation: Forward to the Past

“It is impossible to insult a man who is not unsure of himself.”

Robert Heinlein quoted in Spider Robinson Time Travelers Strictly Cash

“Eventually Richard [III] comes to understand, if not consciously at first, that he was programming himself as a loser, and has thrown himself into the elegiac role of one who has lost his throne before he has actually lost it.”

Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare

“What is being asked of me is clear. Whether I have the talent and understanding sufficient to accomplish the task is God’s affair.”

A remark attributed to "the young Otto von Bismarck... upon receiving a very delicate diplomatic mission in his early twenties" according to a writer whose name I did not record in Commentary March 1990

“‘Oh, Marilla,’ she [Anne] exclaimed one Saturday morning, coming dancing in with her arms full of gorgeous boughs, ‘I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It wouldn’t be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it? Look at these maple branches.’”

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Futurologists (whether utopian or dystopian, and in this instance flapping about the Internet) make “precisely the same mistake that many historians make when writing about the remoter past. And this mistake, it seems to me, is to suppose that to change the material circumstances of life is to alter fundamentally the sense of life itself. But life as it is lived is always pretty much the same, with the same protocols of boredom and excitement, the same glare of midday and gloom of eventide, the same petty ambitions, existential doubts, and immortal longings. We can certainly create the circumstances of greater freedom or greater oppression, but the range of possible variation in life itself, in the simple, irreducible sense of being alive, is far narrower than our chattering classes usually appreciate.”

James Gardner in National Review October 14, 1996