“’I should soon have given up a life of pleasure,’ they say, ‘if I had faith.’ But I tell you: ‘You would soon have faith if you gave up a life of pleasure….’”
Blaise Pascal Pensées
Edmund Wilson’s search for “ultimate meaning in the things of this world... quite often fooled him into thinking that the search for transcendent sensuality can be other than vain.”
Terry Teachout in National Review August 9, 1993
“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves."
Ludwig Wittgenstein on BrainyQuote (https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/ludwig_wittgenstein_103576)
“What is happening to us is that we don’t know what is happening to us and that is exactly what is happening to us.”
José Ortega y Gasset, quoted by Allan Gotlieb in National Post November 17, 2000
“I came to the conclusion that the optimist thought everything good except the pessimist, and that the pessimist thought everything bad, except himself."
G. K. Chesterton, quoted on Thinkexist.com
“Few Christian thinkers have so well understood [as Luther] the abyss of despair that is the alternative to the utterly gratuitous love of God in Christ.”
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things January 2004
“men who are called practical; and the much more practical pertinacity of the man who is called theoretical.”
G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox”
“The most basic form of human stupidity is forgetting what we are trying to accomplish.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7517225-the-most-basic-form-of-human-stupidity-is-forgetting-what) {BTW I have found this in various forms including “common” rather than “basic” - it’s apparently from Human, All Too Human but I couldn’t track down the German original]