“There is a kind of God-shaped hole in many people’s lives…”

John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist

“The situation is not as bad as it seems – it’s worse.”

A Greek Olympic official quoted in Maclean’s July 7, 2000

“when I opened the door [into his own office] and walked into the musty silence of the little waiting room there was the usual feeling of having been dropped down a well dried up twenty years ago to which no one would come back ever. The smell of old dust hung in the air as flat and stale as a football interview.”

Raymond Chandler The Little Sister

“Nose to the grindstone, eyes on the hills.”

Peter F. Drucker Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”

C.S. Lewis, quoted in Joseph Pearce Literary Converts

In my latest National Post column I say the enduring, stomach-churning, decades-long futility of the Toronto Maple Leafs furnishes valuable lessons on how not to succeed in all sorts of areas of life including public policy… if only we could figure out what their secret is.

“this life of dust and broken bottles”.

Mark Studdock realizing with horror that he’d spent his whole life doing things he didn’t enjoy to impress people he didn’t like, in C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength

“The secret of success is to do the common things uncommonly well.”

John D. Rockefeller, quoted in an RBC Financial Group ad in Globe & Mail February 7, 2004