Angles and Aphorisms 0

What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

It profits him the whole world.

___

“Love thy neighbor.”

If you do, the commandment is superfluous.

If you don’t, it’s futile.

___

No one has yet discovered what makes life, or what “life” is. The god explanation is not merely unsatisfactory, it is indefensible.

___

I, me …  this bundle of congenial accidents; this hunger for existence; this dread.

___

Start of a letter to my theoretical biographer: “Dear Avenging Angel …”

___

The Left has become Death, the destroyer of our civilization.

___

Where there is ideology, there will be schism.

___

Often the more you understand the less you forgive.*

___

Christianity was begotten by a vulgarized Hellenism upon a sentimentalized Judaism.

___

Religious persons  say, “If you don’t believe in God you’ll believe in anything.” I say, “If you can believe in ‘God’ you can believe in anything.”**

___

The fatter the government, the thinner the people.

The more generous the government, the more robbed the people.

The more secure the government, the more threatened the people.

___

Justice is elusive but judgment is inescapable.

___

The Roman writer Terence said, “Nothing human is alien to me.” Why can’t I say the same? So much that people do remains incomprehensible to me.

___

There’s an awful lot of condescension in compassion and an awful lot of contempt in condescension.

___

Curse: May you survive to live in the world of your ideals.***

___

Many a belief can survive persecution but not critical examination.

___

A good thing about the Universe and Life is that they have no purpose.

___

Sado-Marxism …

___

Russia cast off the Soviet Union – and revealed itself to be much the same. A wolf in wolf’s clothing.

___

We are more likely to believe what we overhear than what we’re told.

___

Searching for your true self? How do you know which is your true self – the seeker or the sought?

___

Nothing is kept as long and carefully as a grievance.

___

Now in my tenth decade, I ask other old people what they think or feel about dying, and find almost all agree it is not that we will die that troubles us so much as how.

___

To a writer: A reader is a reluctant visitor to your mind. He will not enter your labyrinth unless you bait the path with fascination. His wonder, his curiosity must be aroused, or his amusement.

___

Comes a Marxist, comes twaddle.

___

A writer needs to know that he has weaknesses, vices.

An actor only needs to know that other people have them.

___

Charity is okay, but only when practiced by consenting adults in private.

___

I often feel lonely but seldom want company.

___

Some are born ordinary, some achieve ordinariness, and some have ordinariness thrust upon them. I can’t think of anyone who’s had ordinariness thrust upon him. But I do know lots of people who’ve achieved ordinariness. They were geniuses until they were five and then became ordinary for the rest of their lives.

___

As attractive as a scandal.

As complex as an animal.

As simple as a blow.

___

Wither is what I do, not where I go.

___

It is a sound principle not to do harm. Beyond infancy no one can achieve so impossibly high an aim, but it is good to try.

___

Trying to reason with a Believer is like trying to crack an egg on a pillow.

___

Many “principles” that people hold are not principles but pieties.

___

We find Heaven and Hell on earth. Hell is a collective operation. Heaven depends on private enterprise.

___

We fear that they might do unto us what we would like to do unto them.

___

The value of human life cannot be measured: human life is itself the measure of value. Trying to measure it is like trying to measure the wetness of water.

___

Human life as such has no goal, no theme, no point, no plan, no program, no meaning. History is a soap opera.

___

Whatever a government does it does badly.

___

Anarchism, nihilism, communism. In each case, a feeling in search of a politics.

___

There is no “sin” of greed. There is a “sin” of envy. Let us be free to work for our own maximum profit. Let us have abundance. Let us have feasts, rich harvests, generosity, might, novelty, and splendor.

___

Any idea that needs a law to defend it from criticism is ipso facto a bad idea.

______

Footnotes:

*Quoted by P. J. O’Rourke as an epigraph for his book Holidays in Hell.

**Émile Leon Cammaerts (1878-1953) was a Belgian-born writer who lived and died in England, and who, in an essay on G. K. Chesterton, authored the famous quotation often wrongly attributed to Chesterton himself.: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.” 

***P0ssibly plagiarized from a Chinese sage. I’m not sure.

 

Jillian Becker     March 5, 2024

Posted under by Jillian Becker on Tuesday, March 5, 2024

Tagged with

This post has 0 comments.

Permalink

Comments are closed.