“The pagan set out, with admirable sense, to enjoy himself. By the end of his civilization he had discovered that a man cannot enjoy himself and continue to enjoy anything else.”

G.K. Chesterton Heretics

“What is a human life worth unless it is incorporated into the lives of one’s ancestors and set in a historical context?"

Cicero, quoted in Andrew Nikiforuk School's Out

“Saul Gorn once told me his theory of asceticism: ‘It is well known that the longer one postpones a pleasure, the greater the pleasure is when one finally gets it. Therefore, if one postpones it for ever, the pleasure should be infinite.'”

Raymond Smullyan 5000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies

“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