“peaceful anarchy, than which nothing could be more impossible, given human nature as it is.”
Mortimer J. Adler Ten Philosophical Mistakes
“Happiness is not mostly pleasure; it is mostly victory.”
Harry Emerson Fosdick, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“You may come to ask yourself, ‘What should I do today?’ in a manner that means ‘How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?’”
Jordan Peterson on Instagram (quoting himself and all upper-case in the post) November 11 2020
“‘An angry man,’ said Confucius, ‘is always full of poison.’”
Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“It is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never commonplace. Birth is covered with curtains precisely because it is a staggering and monstrous prodigy. Death and first love, though they happen to everybody, can stop one’s heart with the very thought of them.”
G.K. Chesterton What’s Wrong with the World
“when we scrape away the varnish of wealth, education, class, ethnic origin, parochial loyalties, we discover that however much we’ve changed the shape of man’s physical environment, man himself is still sinful, vain, greedy, ambitious, lustful, self-centered, unrepentant, and requiring of restraint.”
Barry Goldwater With No Apologies (though elsewhere in the book even he said new technologies and ideas might make the world way better in the 21st century)
“In this cult of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker the Rubaiyat stands first in our time; but it does not stand alone.... The same lesson was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw. Great joy has in it the sense of immortality; the very splendour of youth is the sense that it has all space to stretch its legs in. In all great comic literature, in ‘Tristram Shandy’ or ‘Pickwick’, there is this sense of space and incorruptibility; we feel the characters are deathless people in an endless tale. It is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chiefly in certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should think of them as passing, or enjoy them simply ‘for those moments’ sake.’ To do this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it. Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.”
G.K. Chesterton Heretics
“Oh Matthew, isn’t it a wonderful morning? The world looks like something God had just imagined for His own pleasure, doesn’t it? Those trees look as if I could blow them away with a breath – pouf! I’m so glad I live in a world where there are white frosts, aren’t you?”
Anne in Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables [Anne having saved a sick baby the night before]