“‘Whosoever is delighted in solitude,’ goes the old saying that Francis Bacon repeated, ‘is either a wild beast or a god.’ One does not actually have to be a god, but it is true that to enjoy being alone a person must build his own mental routines…”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow (he seems to give the beast option short shrift)
“Learn to pause, or nothing worthwhile can catch up to you.”
Unknown [widely cited, sometimes as a Zen koan, without further attribution]
“’I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done, as long as I enjoyed it at the time,’ she [Katharine Hepburn] once said. That really is not a sound thought, and not even worldly…. If he enjoyed the rape, he should feel no regret for having done it?”
William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review August 11, 2003
“with every baby a new sun and a new moon are made.”
The spirit of Adam Wayne in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“it apparently takes social scientists much longer than poets or critics to realize that every mind is a primitive mind, whatever the varieties of social conditioning.”
Northrop Frye The Great Code
“The lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for the moment’s sake. He enjoys it for the woman’s sake, or his own sake. The warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he enjoys it for the sake of the flag. The cause which the flag stands for may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last for a week. But the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks of his love as something that cannot end. These moments are filled with eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary…. Man cannot love mortal things. He can only love immortal things for an instant.”
G.K. Chesterton Heretics
“reversing, surely, the order of nature by treating their bodies as means of gratification and their souls as mere encumbrances. It makes no odds, to my mind, whether such men live or die; alive or dead, no one hears of them. The truth is that no man really lives or gets any satisfaction out of life, unless he devotes all his energies to some task and seeks fame by some notable achievement or by the cultivation of some admirable gift.”
Sallust The Conspiracy of Catiline
“Is the normal human need, the normal human condition, higher or lower than those special states of the soul which call out a doubtful and dangerous glory? Those special powers of knowledge or sacrifice which are made possible only by the existence of evil? Which should come first to our affections, the enduring sanities of peace or the half-maniacal virtues of battle? Which should come first, the man great in the daily round or the man great in emergency? Which should come first, to return to the enigma before me, the grocer or the chemist”
Adam Wayne in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill