“Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one’s horse as it is leaping.”
Julius Hare, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com/2014/01/gamblers-fools-and-egotists-59-still_31.html
“For there is only one happiness possible or conceivable under the sun, and that is enthusiasm – that strange and splendid word that has passed through so many vicissitudes, which meant, in the eighteenth century, the condition of a lunatic, and in ancient Greece, the presence of a god.”
GKC in an essay on Tolstoy quoted by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #6 [it was an essay Schall found in the library of the U of Virginia that he had never seen before].
“Suggested charge: Existing while stupid”
Headline on MSNBC Weird news December 30, 2010 [the story was about two idiots shooting out streetlights with rifles at a shopping centre around 5:00 a.m. because they didn’t think anyone would be around]
“Friends, when once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honour and his reason.”
Prince Rilian in C.S. Lewis The Silver Chair
“Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he has not created himself – and is nevertheless free. Because having once been hurled into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, quoted by Alberto Knox in Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy
“We live surrounded by mysteries and imagine that by inventing names we explain them.”
W.B. Seabrook, “Goat-Cry, Girl-Cry,” in Chancellor Press Great Ghost Stories
In my latest National Post column I remind commentators that Notre Dame is a Paris “tourist attraction” and historical landmark because it’s a very beautiful church, and suggest that it’s beautiful because of the faith that built it.