“that scarce resource Love.”
Dennis Robertson, urging economists to find ways to minimize the demands public policy places on altruism, quoted in James Buchanan What Should Economists Do?
“for as a costly jewel retains its value even if hidden in a dung-hill, so old age and discretion are to be respected even in the vile persons of our subjects.“
The Tisroc in C.S. Lewis A Horse and His Boy
“Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
Mark Twain, quoted by Jeff Hayden on Inc. online (www.inc.com/jeff-haden/top-350-inspiring-motivational-quotes-to-tweet-and-share.html)
“Some surviving literary works from this period [Egypt’s First Intermediate Period 2200-2050 BC] betray blank despair; others proclaim a crass hedonism; and still others seek a basis for restoration of social order by insisting upon the necessity of personal righteousness.”
William McNeill The Rise of the West
“‘Frankly,’ I reply, ‘I wouldn’t know how to describe the difference.’”
John O’Sullivan in National Review March 25, 1996 (the specific reference was people who diet down to ugly sticks then ask “Notice any change in me?” but it offers far broader “He’s an extraordinary man” possibilities)
“A man’s judgement that whisky is bad for him is not invalidated by the fact that when the bottle is at hand he finds desire stronger than reason and succumbs…. Life, in other words, is as habit-forming as cocaine. What then? If I still held creation to be ‘a great injustice’ I should hold that this impulse to retain life aggravates the injustice.”
C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy (explicitly rejecting G.K. Chesterton's Manalive test that someone who claims to believe life is pointless will object vehemently if you offer to shoot them)
"To predict the broad developments of the future is no more of a tour de force than to divine those of the past.... If past events have left their traces, it is reasonable to imagine that those still to come have their roots."
Honoré de Balzac, quoted in Leonard Silk The Economists