“‘I disagree,’ John Keats once wrote in a letter, about the world as a ‘vale of tears... Call the world, if you please, “the vale of soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world.’”
Thomas Boswell, How Life Imitates The World Series
“to illuminate the human soul.”
The task of historians as well as novelists according to British historian Cicely Veronica Wedgewood (1911-97), quoted in Quotes, Notes and Anecdotes (The Write File Quarterly) Spring 1997 and there attributed to her obituary in The Economist March 28, 1997
“there is an immense amount of pleasure to be derived from the sense of private ownership. It is surely no accident that every man has affection for himself: nature meant this to be so. Selfishness is condemned, and justly, but selfishness is not simply to be fond of oneself, but to be excessively fond.”
Aristotle The Politics.
“It is better to be defeated than to confess defeat in advance.”
William Jennings Bryan in a letter to his brother Charles in 1920, quoted in Robert W. Cherny, A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan
“We do not read Aristotle to find out what people used to think, but for guidance on the issues of today.”
Here I quote myself, from October 1996.
“Now that God is dead, however, or at least comatose”
Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic Monthly March 2004
In my latest National Post column I argue that the solution to toxic anger in politics, far easier said than done, is neither to cause nor succumb to it.
“The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel.”
Horace Walpole, possibly according to Horace Walpole - Wikiquote borrowed from Jean de La Bruyère’s unsourced: “Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think”.