Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”
― T.S. Eliot

“Some people care too much. I think it's called love.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice.

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“You cannot be happy if your primary identity is that of a victim, even if you really are one.”
― Dennis Prager

“We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. There is nothing progressive about being pig-headed and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at the present state of the world it's pretty plain that humanity has been making some big mistake. We're on the wrong road. And if that is so we must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Case for Christianity

“We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

“Engagement is not meant to serve any particular purpose other than its own enhancement, and yet the result is an unnatural global amplification of the ‘easy’ emotions, which happen to be the negative ones…. Remember, with old-fashioned advertising you could measure whether a product did better after an ad was run, but now companies are measuring whether individuals changed their behaviors, and the feeds for each person are constantly tweaked to get individual behavior to change…. The scheme I am describing amplifies negative emotions more than positive ones, so it’s more efficient at harming society than at improving it.”
― Glenn Harlan Reynolds, The Social Media Upheaval

“In his insightful essay In The Beginning was the Command Line, Neal Stephenson wrote that, “The ability to think rationally is pretty rare, even in prestigious universities. We’re in the TV age now, and people think by linking pictures in their brains.” That was 1999.”
― Glenn Harlan Reynolds, The Social Media Upheaval

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds

“The world is, indeed, fraught with peril. The real danger, the one with which you are to be most acutely concerned, is the danger of becoming a coward and a weakling. The world can (and will) kill you, break your body, and deprive you of material possessions, but only you can deprive yourself of dignity and honor.”
― William Ferraiolo, Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure: Stoic Exercise for Mental Fitness

“People have lived through far more difficult and challenging times than those confronting you—and the best among them remained persons of virtue and courage. What excuse do you manufacture for faltering where they did not? If you are a lesser being, then your failure is as it should be. Certainly, a deficient soul cannot complain of trying times. If you are not a lesser being, then set about becoming what you are capable of being, and do not poison the world with whining about circumstance. There is no need of another simpering weakling on the surface of the planet.”
― William Ferraiolo, Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure: Stoic Exercise for Mental Fitness

“When you enter West Point, you find that the Army doesn’t care a hang about the first verses of the Star Spangled Banner. It’s the third verse that you must learn. It goes: Oh thus be it ever when free men shall stand, Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation! Blest with victory and peace, may the heaven rescued land, Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation. Then conquer we must, When our cause it is just, And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust!’ And the star spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!”
― Jerry Pournelle, There Will Be War Volume I

“Your detractors provide valuable lessons. Ask yourself if their criticisms are correct. If so, then improve yourself, and be grateful for their guidance. If, on the other hand, their criticisms are misguided, then recognize that their error is nothing to you. Let them persist in their misperceptions if they must. Should they change their minds and come to respect you, recognize that this is equally insignificant. Perhaps the praise will prove as well or ill-placed as the criticism. Perhaps both assessments will prove inapt and inaccurate. What of it? The wind blows, the people form beliefs, the river flows, and, in the end, the world swallows it all.”
― William Ferraiolo, Meditations on Self-Discipline and Failure: Stoic Exercise for Mental Fitness

“The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding, go out to meet it.” — Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War”
― Joseph Loconte, A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18

“Under federal law, new vaccines and medicines cannot quality for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) if any existing FDA-approved drug proves effective against the same malady: For FDA to issue an EUA (emergency use authorization), there must be no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the candidate product for diagnosing, preventing, or treating the disease or condition. . . .2 Thus, if any FDA-approved drug like hydroxychloroquine (or ivermectin) proved effective against COVID, pharmaceutical companies would no longer be legally allowed to fast-track their billion-dollar vaccines to market under Emergency Use Authorization. Instead, vaccines would have to endure the years-long delays that have always accompanied methodical safety and efficacy testing, and that would mean less profits, more uncertainty, longer runways to market, and a disappointing end to the lucrative COVID-19 vaccine gold rush. Dr. Fauci has invested $6 billion in taxpayer lucre in the Moderna vaccine alone.3 His agency is co-owner4 of the patent and stands to collect a fortune in royalties. At least four of Fauci’s hand-picked deputies are in line to collect royalties of $150,000/year based on Moderna’s success, and that’s on top of the salaries already paid by the American public.5”
― Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health

“The power of self-control is one of the great qualities that differentiates man from the lower animals. He is the only animal capable of a moral struggle or a moral conquest.”
― William George Jordan, Self-Control Its Kingship and Majesty

“Socrates thought that the Spartans’ singular style of speech was a way of strategically getting others to underestimate them: “they conceal their wisdom, and pretend to be blockheads, so that they may seem to be superior only because of their prowess in battle…This is how you may know that I am speaking the truth and that the Spartans are the best educated in philosophy and speaking: if you talk to any ordinary Spartan, he seems to be stupid, but eventually, like an expert marksman, he shoots in some brief remark that proves you to be only a child.”
― The Art of Manliness, The Spartan Way: What Modern Men Can Learn from Ancient Warriors

“According to God’s book, there is “a time to weep and a time to laugh” (Ecclesiastes 3:4). The surest sign that our culture is in deep doo-doo is that we are increasingly sure that this is a time to weep and increasingly doubtful that it is a time to laugh.”
― Peter Kreeft, Ha!: A Christian Philosophy of Humor

“It is said that Christianity, if it is to survive, must face the modern world, must come to terms with the way things are in the sense of the current drift of things. It is just the other way around: If we are to survive, we must face Christianity. The strongest reactionary force impeding progress is the cult of progress itself, which, cutting us off from our roots, makes growth impossible and choice unnecessary. We expire in the lazy, utterly helpless drift, the spongy warmth of an absolute uncertainty. Where nothing is ever true, or right or wrong, there are no problems; where life is meaningless we are free from responsibility, the way a slave or scavenger is free. Futility breeds carelessness, against which stands the stark alternative: against the radical uncertainty by which modern man has lived – as in a game of Russian roulette, stifled in the careless “now” between the click and the explosion, living by the dull grace of empty chambers – the risk of certainty. —John Senior, Ph.D.”
― John Senior, The Death of Christian Culture

“Some things are in our control, while others are not. We control our opinion, choice, desire, aversion, and, in a word, everything of our own doing. We don’t control our body, property, reputation, position, and, in a word, everything not of our own doing. Even more, the things in our control are by nature free, unhindered, and unobstructed, while those not in our control are weak, slavish, can be hindered, and are not our own.” —EPICTETUS, ENCHIRIDION, 1.1–2”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

“Hold sacred your capacity for understanding. For in it is all, that our ruling principle won’t allow anything to enter that is either inconsistent with nature or with the constitution of a logical creature. It’s what demands due diligence, care for others, and obedience to God.”
― Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living