“Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.”
G. K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“The pain in my soul is unbearable. I keep asking myself the same unsolvable question: If my assault rifle took people’s lives, it means that I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, ... son of a farmer and Orthodox Christian am responsible for people’s deaths. The longer I live, the more often that question gets into my brain, the deeper I go in my thoughts and guesses about why the Almighty allowed humans to have devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression. Everything changes, only a man and his thinking remain unchanged: he’s just as greedy, evil, heartless and restless as before!”
Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47 assault rifle in “a regretful letter” to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, shortly before his death at age 94, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen Jan. 14, 2014 (apparently a spokesman for the Patriarch replied “If the weapon is used to defend the Motherland, the Church supports both its creators and the servicemen using it.”)
“Fun and happiness are not synonymous. Happy people don’t need fun. Fun takes your mind off things.”
P.J. O’Rourke The Bachelor Home Companion
“At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise or wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by David W. Fagerberg in First Things March 2000
“The past is irrevocable, but many of the factors behind its tragedies are still at work in the present, and are a danger to the future. The issues change – eugenics is not environmentalism – but the dogmatism and the ego behind the dogmatism are the same.”
Thomas Sowell Is Reality Optional?
“One can’t always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative.”
The narrator re his humble lifestyle as a playwright (before the adventure begins) in H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon
“The fact that… we still live well cannot ease the pain of feeling that we no longer live nobly.”
John Updike, quoted by ordained minister Kevin Little of Ottawa in an Op Ed in Ottawa Citizen June 13, 2002
“I am at our home in Morningside Country Club in Rancho Mirage.... swimming in my great pool. I keep it heated to an insanely high temperature.... I love swimming in it at night. I lie on my back and... watch the moon rise over the hedges. I look at the stars.... it is super pleasant and what did I ever do to deserve it? Who on earth deserves to live like this? I can imagine the prisoners at Auschwitz watching the same stars as they were worked to death and froze to death. I picture the Union soldiers lying wounded before Marye’s Heights in Fredericksburg and dying of loss of blood and exposure and seeing the same stars (although maybe it was raining that night). And the Americans freezing at Bastogne as they held off the Nazis on Christmas Day and seeing the same stars. And here am I swimming in a heated pool watching the stars. It is incredible.... I hope we appreciate it.”
”Ben Stein’s Diary” in The American Spectator March 2006