“Happiness is a hard master – particularly other people’s happiness. A much harder master, if one isn’t conditioned to accept it unquestioningly, than truth.”
Mustapha Mond in Aldous Huxley Brave New World
“Once again, you and your editors show that Gilbert Keith Chesterton is the most important man not living in the world today.”
Letter from William Cassell of Poteau, Oklahoma in Gilbert! Magazine Vol. 5 # 3 (Dec. 2001)
“Kim: They [some Englishmen they just met] are only uncurried donkeys.” The lama: “Then it is not well to make a jest of their ignorance.”
Rudyard Kipling Kim
“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
Steve Jobs, quoted by Jeff Hayden on Inc. online (www.inc.com/jeff-haden/top-350-inspiring-motivational-quotes-to-tweet-and-share.html)
“The pagan set out, with admirable sense, to enjoy himself. By the end of his civilization he had discovered that a man cannot enjoy himself and continue to enjoy anything else.”
G.K. Chesterton Heretics
“Saul Gorn once told me his theory of asceticism: ‘It is well known that the longer one postpones a pleasure, the greater the pleasure is when one finally gets it. Therefore, if one postpones it for ever, the pleasure should be infinite.'”
Raymond Smullyan 5000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies
“Man must be taught to see things as symbols – must be trained to use them for effect, and never for themselves. Above all, the door of delight must remain firmly closed.”
Some bright young devil's pitch to Satan at a board meeting in Hell in Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb p. 111 (hence Capon’s imagined “Harry” who on p. 112 refuses noodles with the Chicken Paprikash because he’s counting calories. “There are, to be sure, greater blasphemies than that against the goodness of creation; but none illustrates better the fundamental antimaterialism of the age. Harry sits in front of one of the finest and simplest goods in the world, and he begs off, not because he does not like it, but because he has ceased to see it. Noodles, for him, are not unique and delightful beings; they have become an abstract subject called highly caloric food. No matter to him that Martha made the noodles herself – that he has before him something he will not meet again for years: He turns them down precisely because they are, to him, no matter at all. It is calories, not noodles, that count…. How sad, then, to see real beings – Harry and all his fellow calorie counters – living their lives in abject terror of things that do not even go bump in the night.”