“Other people’s heads are a wretched place to be the home of a man’s true happiness.”

Schopenhauer deploring the pursuit of fame in “Wisdom of Life,” quoted in Will Durant The Story of Philosophy

“He [the “mature man”] knows, with Carlyle, that there is no sense in vilifying the sun because it will not light our cigars. And perhaps, if we are clever enough to help it, the sun will do even that...”

Will Durant The Story of Philosophy [part of Durant’s critique of Schopenhauer’s excessive gloominess]

“’Can’t you lead a good life without believing in Christianity?’ This is the question on which I have been asked to write, and straight away, before I begin trying to answer it, I have a comment to make. The question sounds as if it were asked by a person who said to himself, ‘I don’t care whether Christianity is in fact true or not. I’m not interested in finding out whether the real universe is more like what the Christians say than what the materialists say. All I’m interested in is leading a good life. I’m going to choose beliefs not because I think them true but because I think them helpful.’ Now frankly, I find it hard to sympathize with this state of mind…. Christianity is not a patent medicine.”

C.S. Lewis “Man or Rabbit?” in The Grand Miracle

“It would be no sort of a life if we felt entirely comfortable in it.”

P.J. Kavanaugh, quoted in The Economist May 5, 1990

“In 1867, Matthew Arnold heard the ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ of the Sea of Faith.”

Charles J. Sykes, A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the American Character

“This curious world we inhabit is more wonderful than convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.”

Henry David Thoreau to his graduating class at Harvard, 1837, cited by Wendell Berry in a sermon reprinted in Harpers magazine March 1988

“A ship wrecked sailor, buried on this coast/ Bids you set sail./ Full many a gallant bark, when we were lost,/ Weathered the gale.”

“a finely translated epigram in the Greek anthology” quoted in William James, Pragmatism and four essays from The Meaning of Truth

In my latest Epoch Times column I say that early efforts to shut down debate over the increasingly plausible man-made origins of COVID just underline why free speech is important… at the very moment that Google and YouTube move on to efforts to suppress free debate on climate change.