“If a man thinks about his physical or moral state, he usually discovers that he is ill.”

Goethe, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail July 10, 2000

“Remembrance is the only paradise out of which we cannot be driven away. Pleasure is the flower that fades, remembrance is the lasting perfume. Remembrances last longer than present realities; I have preserved blossoms for many years, but never fruits.”

Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts

In my latest National Post column I say the search for life in space is boooring because only life with photosynthesis is interesting and even if we find it, which seems highly unlikely, it won’t solve any of our moral or even technological problems here on Earth.

“If all decorum, discipline, and subordination are to be destroyed, and universal Pyrrhonism, anarchy, and insecurity of property are to be introduced, nations will soon wish their books in ashes, seek for darkness and ignorance, superstition and fanaticism, as blessings, and follow the standard of the first mad despot, who, with the enthusiasm of another Mahomet, will endeavor to obtain them.”

John Adams, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind

“You understand that you’re a short-term phenomenon, like the mosquitoes that come in the spring and the fall. You get a perspective on yourself. You’re getting back to the fundamentals of the planet. Neil feels that way, because we’ve talked about it.”

A friend on why first-man-on-the-moon Neil Armstrong loves his farm, quoted in Ottawa Citizen July 16, 1999

“Genius is eternal patience.”

Michelangelo (widely attributed online though I haven't seen any reference to where exactly he said it)

Walter Pater’s “Renaissance, Oscar Wilde told his friend William Butler Yeats, was his own ‘golden book… the very flower of decadence.’ Pater’s aestheticism, however – the cultivation of experience, sensuality, passion, the exotic – although possessing an obvious affinity to the decadents, had a high seriousness, even an ultimate sense of morality, that was lacking in the decadents.”

Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society

“I have only one fault, namely, that I am evil.”

Another “Needhamism” from the then-just-deceased columnist Richard J. Needham, quoted by Malcolm MacLeod of St. John’s in letter to the Globe & Mail July 30, 1996