Painter David Wilkie “once related to his friend Constable that when he studied at the Scottish Academy, Graham, the master of it, was accustomed to say to the students, in the words of Reynolds, ‘If you have genius, industry will improve it; if you have none, industry will supply its place.’ ‘So,’ said Wilkie, ‘I was determined to be very industrious, for I knew I had no genius.’”
Samuel Smiles Self-Help
“Karol Wojtyla who would later tell the French writer André Frossard that the most important world in the Gospels was ‘truth’…”
George Weigel Witness to Hope
“You say I’m a bitch like it’s a bad thing.”
One of the “Expressions for women under stress” found on the Internet, in Globe & Mail March 16, 2001
On Jan. 12 I was on NewsTalk Sauga 960 to discuss my National Post column on the Pope’s remarks about the selfishness of choosing pets over kids, and the self-absorbed response of some commentators.
“The fifteen minutes that I spent with Professor [Duke] Baird did more for my health and happiness than all the rest of the four years I spent in college. ‘Jim,’ he said, ‘you ought to sit down and face the facts. If you devoted half as much time and energy to solving your problems as you do to worrying about them, you wouldn't have any worries. Worrying is just a vicious habit you have learned.’ He gave me three rules to break the worry habit:/ Rule 1. Find out precisely what is the problem you are worrying about./ Rule 2. Find out the cause of the problem. Rule 3. Do something constructive at once about solving the problem.”
Jim Birdsall “I Was ‘The Worrying Wreck from Virginia Tech”’ in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living [in consequence of receiving this advice, among other things he proposed to the girl he was afraid would leave him, and she said yes].
“Writing shortly after the Roman disaster at Adrianople in 378 AD, the able historian Ammianus recited a similar list of disasters, and summed up by saying that Rome had come back from all of them and, given political will and good fortune, would do so again. Thirty years later, the Visigoths were in Rome.”
Eric Morse in Globe & Mail August 17 2004
In my latest National Post column I lampoon self-centred objections to the Pope calling preferring pets to children selfish.
“he looked upon us as a sort of animals, to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use, than by its assistance, to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had not given us; that we …had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavours to supply them by our own inventions…”
The narrator’s account of his Houyhnhnm master’s judgement on humans, in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels