“Some surviving literary works from this period [Egypt’s First Intermediate Period 2200-2050 BC] betray blank despair; others proclaim a crass hedonism; and still others seek a basis for restoration of social order by insisting upon the necessity of personal righteousness.”

William McNeill The Rise of the West

“A man’s judgement that whisky is bad for him is not invalidated by the fact that when the bottle is at hand he finds desire stronger than reason and succumbs…. Life, in other words, is as habit-forming as cocaine. What then? If I still held creation to be ‘a great injustice’ I should hold that this impulse to retain life aggravates the injustice.”

C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy (explicitly rejecting G.K. Chesterton's Manalive test that someone who claims to believe life is pointless will object vehemently if you offer to shoot them)

“I grant you that my children need their meals balanced…. My own feeling, however, is that they need something else even more. They need to have their tastes unbalanced: to have them skewed, driven off dead center, and fastened firmly on the astonishing oddness of the world.”

Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb

“We are as Hector on the walls of Troy with Andromache and always have been. Only the Crystal Palace and all those nineteenth-century trust funds ever assured us otherwise.”

An author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine October 1991

“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied."

John Stuart Mill, quoted as "Thought du jour" in Globe & Mail February 15, 2002

“as you know very well, the only conceivable way to play a game is to treat it extremely seriously.”

A character in E.F. Benson “In The Tube” in Roald Dahl, ed. Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories

In my latest Convivium article I say the people playing at holding a Black Mass in Ottawa weren’t serious… which is.

“I remember when Jack Smith, putting together a story on me, read me a quote from Jack London: ‘I would rather be a meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.’ ‘What does that mean to you?’ Jack Smith asked. I thought for a long moment, and then I said, ‘Throw deep.’”

Kenny Stabler Snake