“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”
Charlie Chaplin, quoted in Globe & Mail March 24, 1999
“by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
The king of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
“Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which other thoughts are drained.”
“Robert Bloch, the screenwriter of the movie Psycho” quoted by John Ivison in National Post June 19, 2004
“In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it. This is because there is nothing that can take its place.”
“That the weak overcomes the strong/ And the submissive overcomes the hard/ Everyone in the world knows yet no one can put/ This knowledge into practice.”
Lao Tzu II.LXXVIII.186-187
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the difficulty people have condemning calls for churches to burn is a worrying sign of our rapid descent into a vindictive and pitiless neopagan mindset.
“Did someone already make the point that if faith in God is absurd, faith in man is pitiful?”
Again I quote myself, a thought prompted on August 14, 2001 by forced abortions in the People’s Republic of China
“Everyone is in the best seat.”
John Cage quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go
“Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.”
Søren Kierkegaard, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen To Go