“It is often observed that it is human nature to dislike those whom we have injured…”
David Frum Dead Right
“Napoleon had everything men usually crave – glory, power, riches – yet he said at St Helena: ‘I have never known six happy days in my life’; while Helen Keller – blind, deaf, dumb – declared, ‘I have found life so beautiful.’ If half a century of living has taught me anything at all, it has taught me that ‘Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.’”
Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“The [French] Revolution appealed to the idea of an abstract and eternal justice, beyond all local custom or convenience. If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man. Here Burke made his brilliant diversion… the modern argument of scientific relativity; in short, the argument of evolution. He suggested that humanity was everywhere molded by or fitted to its environment and institutions; in fact, that each people practically got, not only the tyrant it deserved, but the tyrant it ought to have. ‘I know nothing of the rights of men,’ he said, ‘but I know something of the rights of Englishmen.’ There you have the essential atheist.”
G.K. Chesterton What’s Wrong with the World
“Do you know that disease and death must needs overtake us, no matter what we are doing?... What do you wish to be doing when it overtakes you?... If you have anything better to be doing when you are overtaken, get to work on that.”
Epictetus, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen To Go
“From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
Immanuel Kant, quoted in Brian Lee Crowley The Road to Equity
“‘There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.’”
C.S. Lewis, quoted by Douglas Jackson in Gilbert! magazine January-February 2002
“Generally speaking, the ordinary man should be content with the terrible secret that men are men – which is another way of saying that they are brothers.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Oct. 8, 1910, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #5 (March 2004)
“There is no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval.”
Santayana, quoted by Jon Winokur, ed. Zen to Go