“He wore… clothes that looked like what starts fires in old warehouses.”
Spider Robinson Time Travellers Strictly Cash
“How can these people strike dignified attitudes, and pretend that things really matter, when the total ludicrousness of life is proved by the very method by which it is supported? A man strikes the lyre, and says, ‘Life is real, life is earnest,’ and then goes into a room and stuffs alien substances into a hole in his head.”
The king in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“If we really do discount time positively, why does anyone ever eat their cake then their icing?”
OK, this one’s me again, from April 5, 2002, and possibly only interesting to economists.
“The truth is, whatever you can’t talk about is already out of control in your life…”
Rick Warren The Purpose-Driven Life
“I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it.”
“Jonathan Winters (1925-), American comedian and actor” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail December 28, 2011
“The question of the existence of God is the single most important question we face about the nature of reality…. Neither question [does the concept of a personal God make sense and should we believe in one] is easy to answer. God is a different kind of being from any other that we might speak about.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“Life is a business that doesn’t cover its costs.”
Schopenhauer, quoted in Martin Heidegger An Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger did not agree, but said in recent centuries it had been treated like one)
“The term nearest to being synonymous with pleasure is volition: what it pleases a man to do, or what he pleases to do, may be far from giving him enjoyment; yet shall we say that in doing it, he is not following his own pleasure?… A native of Japan, when he is offended, stabs himself to prove the intensity of his feelings. It is difficult to prove enjoyment in this case: yet the man obeyed his impulses.”
John Hill Burton, “Bentham’s editor”, quoted in I.A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism and sourced to Jeremy Bentham’s Works, vol. I