“I could go on and on.” “We know.”
Me on March 14 2015 at an event where a speaker used the first phrase and it was only with great difficulty that I restrained myself from shouting out the second.
“And who can tell, perhaps the purpose of man’s life on earth consists precisely in this uninterrupted striving after a goal. That is to say, the purpose is life itself and not the goal…”
Fyodor Dostoevsky “Notes from Underground” in Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and selections from The House of the Dead
“Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.”
Ovid (43 B.C. to 18 A.D.) in Robert Byrne, ed., 1,911 Best things anybody ever said
“Economists’ work is often criticized as being ‘useful as a chocolate teapot,’ The Economist magazine wrote.”
Ottawa Citizen October 25, 1997 (though it has occurred to me since that (a) you could eat a chocolate teapot and (b) what’s really wrong with economists’ work isn’t that it’s not useful, it’s that people don’t want to hear about it... but it’s still a lovely metaphor).
In my latest Epoch Times column I say Ontario’s supposed plan to save our “crumbling” health care system is a bunch of vague arm-waving wishes that the world worked differently than it does that couldn’t be less creative, bold or useful if the people in authority were being dull, timid and pointless on purpose.
“He also acknowledged that his story had a movie-of-the-week quality to it. ‘The trouble is, I’m one of the actors,’ he said. ‘It’s my life.’”
Some guy who had suffered a most peculiar and devastating misfortune, in Maclean’s August 2, 1993
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing; that’s why it’s recommended daily.”
Zig Ziglar, emailed by a friend and confirmed online e.g. at https://due.com/blog/zig-ziglar-motivation-and-baths-recommended-daily/
“She [Iris Murdoch] cannot believe in a personal God, she says, because God cannot be ‘a thing among other things.’ That is disappointing. One learns in Christian Theology 101 that God is not a thing among things, an existent among existents, but the Absolute Being of all that is, was, or ever can be. But apparently Iris Murdoch did not learn that in her Anglo-Irish Protestant childhood. It is truly disconcerting how often this happens. One encounters people who say they do not believe in God only to discover, upon examination, that the God they do not believe in I do not believe in either. But it is especially disconcerting in someone of the intellectual stature of Iris Murdoch.”
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things December 2003