“How ludicrous and outlandish is astonishment at anything that happens in life.”
Marcus Aurelius Meditations
“For they [John Smith’s audience] did believe in the spirit of the devil which, as everyone knows, is in all of us.”
Walter Lippman The Public Philosophy
“how much human nature loves the knowledge of its existence, and how it shrinks from being deceived, will be sufficiently understood from this fact, that every man prefers to grieve in a sane mind, rather than to be glad in madness.”
St. Augustine City of God
“There is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom, some spark of friendship for human kind, some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and serpent”.
David Hume, quoted in William Bennett The Book of Virtues.
“We must not provide against the loss of wealth by poverty, or of friends by refusing all acquaintance, or of children by having none, but by morality and reason.”
Plutarkhos, aka Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus Plutarch’s Lives Vol. I
“I have said that they were truly happy; and without strong affection, and humanity of heart, and gratitude to that Being whose code is Mercy, and whose great attribute is Benevolence to all things that breathe, true happiness can never be attained.”
Charles Dickens Oliver Twist
“Nearly all the most awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable, from ‘A child is born’ to ‘A soul is damned.’ If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?… Only the mass of men, for instance, have authority to say whether life is good. Whether life is good is an especially mystical and delicate question, and, like all such questions, is asked in words of one syllable. It is also answered in words of one syllable, and Bernard Shaw (as also mankind) answers ‘yes.’”
G.K. Chesterton, “Shaw, The Philosopher,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure: It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?”
Oscar Wilde quoted in Filip Palda The History of Tobacco Regulation: Forward to the Past