“The examined life is no great shakes either”.
Another from me, on December 10 2021, prompted by entering the April 1 Socrates quotation into the relevant digital file
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Socrates, quoted in Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century (and about 10 million other places)
“something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room…. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture.”
C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man
“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved. And to be steady on all the battle fields besides is merely flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”
Martin Luther, quoted among many other places by https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/657155-if-i-profess-with-the-loudest-voice-and-clearest-exposition
“In the first place, divest yourself of all bias in favor of novelty and singularity of opinion. Indulge them in any other subject rather than that of religion. It is too important, and the consequences of error may be too serious. On the other hand, shake off all the fears and servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”
Thomas Jefferson, in a 1787 letter to his orphan nephew Peter Carr, quoted in William Bennett The Book of Virtues
“For to feel oneself a martyr, as everybody knows, is a pleasurable thing, and the true tragedy of my position was that I had passed that stage. I had enjoyed what sweets it had to offer in ever dwindling degree since the middle of August…”
Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands
“What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth…”
John Keats, quoted in I.A. Richards Principles of Literary Criticism
In my latest Loonie Politics column I advocate thinking about things you don’t want to think about, from Putin’s motives to Xi Jinping’s ideology to James Burnham’s warning about the “Suicide of the West”.