In my latest Nstional Post column I say the meaning of life is not to be found in the latest gadget even if it is a watch that can tell you your blood oxygen level every three seconds.
“Men have never been good, they are not good and they never will be good.”
Karl Barth, Christliche Gemeinde quoted in Mackenzie Institute Newsletter July 2002
“The alternative to perfection of self is perfection of others: Either I will concentrate on me and my welfare or on others and their welfare; in other words, mind my own business or mind other people’s business.”
Leonard Read Let Freedom Reign
“Remembrance is the only paradise out of which we cannot be driven away. Pleasure is the flower that fades, remembrance is the lasting perfume. Remembrances last longer than present realities; I have preserved blossoms for many years, but never fruits.”
Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts
“You understand that you’re a short-term phenomenon, like the mosquitoes that come in the spring and the fall. You get a perspective on yourself. You’re getting back to the fundamentals of the planet. Neil feels that way, because we’ve talked about it.”
A friend on why first-man-on-the-moon Neil Armstrong loves his farm, quoted in Ottawa Citizen July 16, 1999
“Genius is eternal patience.”
Michelangelo (widely attributed online though I haven't seen any reference to where exactly he said it)
Walter Pater’s “Renaissance, Oscar Wilde told his friend William Butler Yeats, was his own ‘golden book… the very flower of decadence.’ Pater’s aestheticism, however – the cultivation of experience, sensuality, passion, the exotic – although possessing an obvious affinity to the decadents, had a high seriousness, even an ultimate sense of morality, that was lacking in the decadents.”
Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society
“I have only one fault, namely, that I am evil.”
Another “Needhamism” from the then-just-deceased columnist Richard J. Needham, quoted by Malcolm MacLeod of St. John’s in letter to the Globe & Mail July 30, 1996