“You may come to ask yourself, ‘What should I do today?’ in a manner that means ‘How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?’”
Jordan Peterson on Instagram (quoting himself and all upper-case in the post) November 11 2020
“You recall that Timothy was warned by St. Paul that anyone who neglects to provide for his own house (meaning his own family) has disowned the faith and is ‘worse than an infidel.’”
Margaret Thatcher to the Church of Scotland, quoted in Fr. James V. Schall Religion, Wealth and Poverty
“‘An angry man,’ said Confucius, ‘is always full of poison.’”
Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home.”
President George W. Bush in his address to the nation on the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia, quoted in OpinionJournal February 1 2003
“It is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never commonplace. Birth is covered with curtains precisely because it is a staggering and monstrous prodigy. Death and first love, though they happen to everybody, can stop one’s heart with the very thought of them.”
G.K. Chesterton What’s Wrong with the World
“when we scrape away the varnish of wealth, education, class, ethnic origin, parochial loyalties, we discover that however much we’ve changed the shape of man’s physical environment, man himself is still sinful, vain, greedy, ambitious, lustful, self-centered, unrepentant, and requiring of restraint.”
Barry Goldwater With No Apologies (though elsewhere in the book even he said new technologies and ideas might make the world way better in the 21st century)
“it is not the creation of wealth that is wrong but love of money for its own sake. The spiritual dimension comes in deciding what one does with the wealth.”
Margaret Thatcher to the Church of Scotland in Fr. James Vincent Schall Religion, Wealth and Poverty
“In this cult of the pessimistic pleasure-seeker the Rubaiyat stands first in our time; but it does not stand alone.... The same lesson was taught by the very powerful and very desolate philosophy of Oscar Wilde. It is the carpe diem religion; but the carpe diem religion is not the religion of happy people, but of very unhappy people. Great joy does not gather the rosebuds while it may; its eyes are fixed on the immortal rose which Dante saw. Great joy has in it the sense of immortality; the very splendour of youth is the sense that it has all space to stretch its legs in. In all great comic literature, in ‘Tristram Shandy’ or ‘Pickwick’, there is this sense of space and incorruptibility; we feel the characters are deathless people in an endless tale. It is true enough, of course, that a pungent happiness comes chiefly in certain passing moments; but it is not true that we should think of them as passing, or enjoy them simply ‘for those moments’ sake.’ To do this is to rationalize the happiness, and therefore to destroy it. Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.”
G.K. Chesterton Heretics