“By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences.”
C.S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters
“Here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not ‘This is a misfortune,’ but ‘To bear this worthily is good fortune.’”
Marcus Aurelius, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail September 11, 2002
“Happy the people whose annals are tiresome, happy the people whose annals are vacant.”
Montesquieu, according to Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
“As to fighting, keep out of it if you can, by all means. When the time comes, if it ever should, that you have to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to a challenge to fight, say ‘No’ if you can – only take care you make it clear to yourselves why you say ‘No.’ It’s a proof of the highest courage, if done from true Christian motives. It’s quite right and justifiable, if done from a simple aversion to physical pain and danger. But don’t say ‘No’ because you fear a licking, and say or think it’s because you fear God, for that’s neither Christian nor honest. And if you do fight, fight it out; and don’t give in while you can stand and see.”
Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays
In response to those who ask of the obvious moral advice explained by Christianity, “why cannot you take the truths and leave the doctrines?…. The first answer is simply to say that I am a rationalist. I like to have some intellectual justification for my intuitions.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“Thomas Aquinas… did, with a most solid and colossal conviction, believe in Life; and in something like what Stevenson called the great theorem of the livableness of life.”
G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox”
In my latest Epoch Times column I say Patrick Brown’s claim to be a “pragmatic” conservative actually means voters have no idea what he would do if elected and neither does he… like an amazingly long line of political figure prone to boasting of their mental and moral hollowness..
“Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.”
Martin Luther King Jr., quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email Jan. 18 2022; other online sources attribute it to “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” (31 March 1968) (for instance https://quotepark.com/quotes/723559/history/)