“Ain’t no sense worryin’ about things you got no control over ‘cause, if you ain’t got no control over ‘em, ain’t no sense worryin’. And it ain’t no sense worryin’ about things you got control over ‘cause, if you got control over ‘em, ain’t no sense worryin’.”
U.S. baseball player Mickey Rivers, quoted in The Write File Quarterly Issue #5, Summer 1995
“how much human nature loves the knowledge of its existence, and how it shrinks from being deceived, will be sufficiently understood from this fact, that every man prefers to grieve in a sane mind, rather than to be glad in madness.”
St. Augustine City of God
“A person who never travels always praises his own mother’s cooking.”
A Baganda proverb “roughly translated” according to Philip Turner, who spent 10 years as a missionary in Uganda, in First Things June-July 2005.
“There is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom, some spark of friendship for human kind, some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent”.
David Hume, quoted in William Bennett The Book of Virtues.
“I no longer think of it as [writer’s] block. I think that is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. If your wife locks you out of the house, you don’t have a problem with your door.”
Anne Lamott Some Instructions on Writing and Life (her point being that you’re not blocked from getting something out that is inside you, you’re empty)
“Perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quoted in The Economist June 15, 1991
“We must not provide against the loss of wealth by poverty, or of friends by refusing all acquaintance, or of children by having none, but by morality and reason.”
Plutarkhos, aka Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus Plutarch’s Lives Vol. I
“The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and, instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”
Samuel Johnson, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail Nov. 5 1999