“‘Shucks,’ he [Thomas Edison] told a discouraged co-worker during one trying series of experiments, ‘we haven’t failed. We now know a thousand things that won’t work, so we’re that much closer to finding what will.’”

Edison’s son Charles, quoted in William Bennett The Book of Virtues [BTW a friend once emailed me this version: “I haven’t failed, I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” They attributed it to Benjamin Franklin which appears to be spurious, but it is also widely available on line as being from Edison and I suspect it is an erroneous version of the above.]

“fairy land arouses [in the child] a longing for he knows not what.”

C.S. Lewis quoted by David W. Fagerberg in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 17 #1 (9-10/13)

“If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.”

La Rochefoucauld, quoted in Globe & Mail October 18, 1999

“[T]he absorption of the man and the exclusion of other matters show not how dull the subject is, but how fascinating it is. Because a man refuses to come out of Eden, they assume that he is being detained in gaol.”

G.K. Chesterton on absorption in apparently trivial hobbies, in “A Defence of Bores,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton

“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.”

Confucius, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go

“The intolerant myth may come from the fact that ‘tolerance’ is a vague term that is largely undefined. It does tend to elicit an emotional response. Tolerance is a good thing and is meant to serve justice. So if someone disagrees with me on an essential matter of the faith, I have to be very tolerant of the person, accepting and open to them, but that does not mean I should accept their ideas in a kind of moral relativism.”

“Rev. Eric Nicolai, with the communications office of Opus Dei in Montreal” asked in an e-mail conversation about the organization’s sinister image, in Ottawa Citizen October 7, 2002

“There’s a French expression that translates as: ‘When I look at myself, I despair; when I look at others, I’m consoled.’”

Paul Wells in National Post December 30, 1999

“It was my survival instinct and force of character which saved me. I never panicked, became stressed or cried. I was even singing. I went there after a little bout of depression but when I found myself suddenly trapped and in a survival situation, everything changed.”

A man found alive after five weeks trapped in underground caves in southwestern France, who survived by eating rotten wood and clay, quoted in Globe & Mail January 24, 2005.