“Sometimes our stomachs hurt because we would go up to 15 days without eating. There were times when we only had one bird to share among the three of us.… We never lost hope because there’s a God Almighty and I have a lot of faith in Him. I knew He was going to help us.”

A guy who went on a three-week fishing trip from his home in Mexico with two friends that turned into a nine-month, 8,000 kilometre ordeal that ended in the North Pacific, living on raw seagulls, raw fish and rainwater, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen August 17, 2006.

On retiring he was planning to start reading and contemplating. But while the contemplative life is important “in what sense could one man’s contemplative life take on such grandiose proportions that it could be viewed as ‘for the good of human society’? Most of the ‘solitary contemplatives’ I know these days are pondering stuff a good bit removed from the ‘good of human society.’… It was at this critical log jam in my thinking that my wife earned her keep, signing me up at church for a ‘men’s group.’ I was initially skeptical, to say the least. Participation in such groups has always struck me as something akin to walking on red-hot coals. I have visions of guys dropping all their comfortable, manly gruff and gusto, squeamishly ‘sharing’ stories of personal picadilloes best kept to themselves, just before they completely unman themselves with a torrent of tears. But it didn’t turn out that way at all. This ‘men’s group’ was instead a first cousin to the bookish life – a Shakespeare reading group, where for three years now our little band of brothers has read from the Bard’s best every Sunday night, shouted hearty toasts over ale, and argued ad infinitum (in a very masculine manner), about the meaning of the very masculine life!”

Mark Johnson in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 3-4/22

“My [Houyhnhnm] master … said, a fancy would sometimes take a Yahoo to retire into a corner, to lie down, and howl, and groan, and spurn away all that came near him, although he were young and fat, wanted neither food nor water, nor did the servant imagine what could possibly ail him. And the only remedy they found was, to set him to hard work, after which he would infallibly come to himself. To this I was silent out of partiality to my own kind; yet here I could plainly discover the true seeds of spleen, which only seizes on the lazy, the luxurious, and the rich; who, if they were forced to undergo the same regimen, I would undertake for the cure.”

Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”

Jim Ryun, in another from Jeff Hayden on Inc. online (www.inc.com/jeff-haden/top-350-inspiring-motivational-quotes-to-tweet-and-share.html)

“You assume that the defining characteristic of a religion is that it is a religion. No. The defining characteristic of a religion is whether it is right or wrong.”

Michael Coren (back when he was sensible) in an e-mail debate with Karen Selick in Western Standard October 25, 2004.

“A hive of passivity.”

Me again, on laziness, from September 17, 2004

In my latest Loonie Politics column I praise John Tory for finding the honour to resign as mayor of Toronto, and mean it the second time, instead of denying that character had any relevance to politics like most of those commenting on the affair or whispering or yelling in his ear

“But my time and labour was little worth, and so it was as well employed one way as another.”

Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe