“I have in my own fashion learned the lesson that life is effort, unremittingly repeated.”
Henry James, emailed by a friend and sourced to Henry James: A Life
“’Can’t you lead a good life without believing in Christianity?’ This is the question on which I have been asked to write, and straight away, before I begin trying to answer it, I have a comment to make. The question sounds as if it were asked by a person who said to himself, ‘I don’t care whether Christianity is in fact true or not. I’m not interested in finding out whether the real universe is more like what the Christians say than what the materialists say. All I’m interested in is leading a good life. I’m going to choose beliefs not because I think them true but because I think them helpful.’ Now frankly, I find it hard to sympathize with this state of mind…. Christianity is not a patent medicine.”
C.S. Lewis “Man or Rabbit?” in The Grand Miracle
“David Frost was expected to sink without a trace, but instead he rose without a trace.”
Kitty Muggeridge, quoted by William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review June 14, 1999
“It would be no sort of a life if we felt entirely comfortable in it.”
P.J. Kavanaugh, quoted in The Economist May 5, 1990
“It is only the fetish of some economists (e.g., Hirshleifer, 1985) that rejects the idea that one person’s self-interest cannot include the welfare of others.”
W.T. Stanbury in Walter Block and George Lerner, eds., Breaking the Shackles: Deregulating Canadian Industry
“A neurosis is a secret you don’t know you’re keeping.”
Kenneth Tynan quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail February 4, 2005
“The haves and the have-nots can be traced back to the dids and the did-nots.”
D.P. Diffiné, “The 1993 American Incentive System Almanac”
“In 1867, Matthew Arnold heard the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the Sea of Faith.”
Charles J. Sykes, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character