“We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.”
Albert Einstein, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go
“In this pathetic and simple-minded view, humans are to be but life-support systems for free-wheeling genitalia.”
William Gairdner The Trouble with Democracy
“No object is mysterious. The mystery is your eye.”
Elizabeth Bowen, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go
“Maybe we’re all just blobs of sentient meat in a senseless existence.”
Tina in the comic strip “Tina’s Groove” in Ottawa Citizen Feb. 15, 2003
“the world where every star is a diamond, every leaf an emerald, every drop of blood a ruby…”
G.K. Chesterton to his fiancée in a letter after her sister Gertrude died, quoted by David Fagerberg in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #6 (April-May 2001)
“Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.”
Benjamin Franklin, quoted on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/51600-many-a-man-thinks-he-is-buying-pleasure-when-he)
“’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