“The great moralists of the past – Aristotle, Cicero, St. Thomas, and Samuel Johnson – all had this in common, a willingness to face the facts about the human race without despairing...”
An author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine April 1988 [the piece continued “and it is to that company that Joseph Pieper belongs” and I assume it was a book review]
“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
Aldous Huxley, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail February 23, 2011
“The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Roman Converts” in Dublin Review, January/March 1925, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #8 (July/August 2001)
“Benevolence is the heart of man, and rightness his road. Sad it is indeed when a man gives up the right road… and allows his heart to stray without enough sense to go after it.”
Mencius in Mencius
“this link between art and the sacred stems from the very fibres of man in all civilizations; specialists in prehistorical times confirm this fact for us, and as early as the appearance of cave art…. Still today it is striking to see to what extent artistic impotence is connected to the absence of the sacred.”
Regine Pernoud Those Terrible Middle Ages
In my latest Nstional Post column I say the meaning of life is not to be found in the latest gadget even if it is a watch that can tell you your blood oxygen level every three seconds.
“The amusements of mankind, at least of the English part of mankind, teach the same lesson. Our shooting, our hunting, our traveling, our climbing have become laborious pursuits. It is a common saying abroad that ‘an Englishman’s notion of a holiday is a fatiguing journey’…”
Walter Bagehot Physics and Politics [the “lesson” being about our inherited, possibly excessive predisposition to action]
“Men have never been good, they are not good and they never will be good.”
Karl Barth, Christliche Gemeinde quoted in Mackenzie Institute Newsletter July 2002