“It seems to be the great business of life to create wants as fast as they are satisfied."
Samuel Johnson Adventurer 119 quoted in a footnote to my edition of Samuel Johnson The History of Rasselas
“When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd. For instance, success in all its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, explaining and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer. In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, 'licking the earth.’”
Malcolm Muggeridge in "A Twentieth-Century Testimony", quoted by Stephen R. Covey The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the Character Ethic
“‘I can truly say that I have hardly ever been bored in my life… The only glimpse I ever got in my life of the hell of unbearable monotony, of something I felt I would rather die than endure, was in some of those films describing the fast and fashionable life of New York.’”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Unpsychological Age” in Sidelights, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #4 (Jan-Feb. 2006)
Rasselas reflects on the difference between a beast and man. “’I am hungry and thirsty like him, but when thirst and hunger cease I am not at rest; I am, like him, pained with want, but am not, like him, satisfied with fulness. The intermediate hours are long and gloomy; I long again to be hungry that I may again quicken my attention.’”
Samuel Johnson The History of Rasselas
Re kids’ preference for bland junk food “It is a situation which I classify (along with most other aspects of domestic life) as desperate but not serious.”
Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb
In my latest National Post column I say if the press take a “UFO expert” seriously we contribute to a general atmosphere of idiocy in public discussion.
“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)