“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.”
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
“For everywhere, above and below, you will find nothing but the selfsame things; they fill the pages of all history, ancient, modern, and contemporary; and they fill our cities and homes today. There is no such thing as novelty; all is as trite as it is transitory.”
Marcus Aurelius Meditations VII.1
“If you cannot prevent your enemies from swallowing you whole, at least you must do what you can to prevent them from digesting you.”
“Rousseau’s famous charge to the Poles” quoted by George Weigel in Witness to Hope (saying that in World War II it “was tested as never before.”)
“There is nothing useless in nature; not even uselessness itself.”
Montaigne, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen To Go
“Surely what matters in a dogma – religious, political or any other kind – is not the motive of those who advance it, but whether it is true or false.”
Ted and Virginia Byfield in “Orthodoxy” in British Columbia Report August 18, 1997
“‘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.