In my latest Epoch Times column I reflect for Remembrance Day on the moving ritual of sounding the Last Post at the Menin Gate every single night for 77 years and counting.
“He [the “mature man”] knows, with Carlyle, that there is no sense in vilifying the sun because it will not light our cigars. And perhaps, if we are clever enough to help it, the sun will do even that...”
Will Durant The Story of Philosophy [part of Durant’s critique of Schopenhauer’s excessive gloominess]
“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