“Every activity has its own specific goal. Pleasure very probably ensues in most cases when this goal is reached, but that is a different matter.”

I.A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism

“How ludicrous and outlandish is astonishment at anything that happens in life.”

Marcus Aurelius Meditations

“For they [John Smith’s audience] did believe in the spirit of the devil which, as everyone knows, is in all of us.”

Walter Lippman The Public Philosophy

“In another illustration of dwarfed ambition, Whitby bills itself as ‘Durham’s Business Centre.’”

Christie Blatchford in National Post November 25, 2000

“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.