“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. If the cause of the trouble lies in your own character, set about reforming your principles; who is there to hinder you? If it is the failure to take some apparently sound course of action that is vexing you, then why not take it, instead of fretting? ‘There is an insuperable obstacle in the way.’ In that case, do not worry; the responsibility for inaction is not yours. ‘But life is not worth living with this undone.’ Why then, bid life a good-humoured farewell; accepting the frustration gracefully, and dying like any other man whose actions have not been inhibited.”

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“A serious house on serious earth”

Philip Larkin, a non-believer, in his poem “Church Going”, describing what churches used to be and wondering what will happen if nobody goes any more, quoted by fellow non-believer Robert Fulford in National Post Dec. 24, 2005

“She could sing like a Florence nightingale.”

Samuel Goldwyn, according to Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #2 (Oct.-Nov. 2002) [I can’t find any independent confirmation that he ever said it but if not he missed an opportunity… to crib from Peter Pan creator James M. Barrie, who said: “I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not, it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.” (See https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/james_m_barrie_131580)]

“If you can be summed up in a paragraph, there’s something wrong with you.”

Victoria Coren in The London Observer quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail February 21, 2005

In the National Post I describe the new experience of trying to bowl after watching an instructional video, which turned out to be sort of like golf in its comic disaster.