“Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it.”

Benjamin Franklin, quoted on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/51600-many-a-man-thinks-he-is-buying-pleasure-when-he)

“The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.”

G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 No. 2 (Oct.-Nov. 2000)

“’I should soon have given up a life of pleasure,’ they say, ‘if I had faith.’ But I tell you: ‘You would soon have faith if you gave up a life of pleasure….’”

Blaise Pascal Pensées

‘‘It is a monotonous memory which keeps us in the main from seeing things as splendid as they are.’”

G.K. Chesterton quoted by James V. Schall, SJ in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 # 8 (July-August 1999)

Edmund Wilson’s search for “ultimate meaning in the things of this world... quite often fooled him into thinking that the search for transcendent sensuality can be other than vain.”

Terry Teachout in National Review August 9, 1993

“Mysteries are like the sun, dazzling, yet plain to all eyes.”

John Donne "in his third satire" quoted by George Watson in Chronicles magazine September 1991

In BOE Report I ask why people who dismiss the Pope when he expounds Catholic doctrine are all ears when he recites dogma about climate change.