“A lot of times when I think I’m being self-sufficient, I’m really just learning to live without the things that I need.” – Kevin Wilson

“He liked to get off by himself, a mile or so from camp, and listen to the country, not the men.” ― Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove)

“Anything is better than lies and deceit!” ― Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!” ― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)

“When we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.” ― Alan Jacobs, citing T.S. Elliot (How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds)

“Much of our delight in watching people perform and achieve derives from our belief in their delight. (In much the same way we enjoy watching the flight of birds, associating such flying with freedom, play, and joy. And yet we have no interest in watching members of our own species drive to McDonald’s.)” ― Alan Jacobs (How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds)

“When everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not.” ― Alan Jacobs (How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds)

“People invested in not knowing, not thinking about, certain things in order to have “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved” will be ecstatic when their instinct for consensus is gratified—and wrathful when it is thwarted.” ― Alan Jacobs (How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds)

“The person who wants to think will have to practice patience and master fear.” ― Alan Jacobs (How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds)

“About some things—about many things!—we believe that people should have not open minds but settled convictions. We cannot make progress intellectually or socially until some issues are no longer up for grabs.” ― Alan Jacobs (How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds)

“There can be more genuine fellowship among those who share the same disposition than among those who share the same beliefs, especially if that disposition is toward kindness and generosity.” ― Alan Jacobs (How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds)

“Why would people ever think, when thinking deprives them of “the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.” ― Alan Jacobs (How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds)

“What is repugnant to every human being is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person.” The key word there is always: to be “reckoned…as a member of a class” Is sometimes useful, often necessary, but intolerably offensive as a universal practice.” – Dorothy Sayers

“Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?” —> “So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.” ― Dorothy L. Sayers (Gaudy Night)

“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair…the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” – Dorothy Sayers

“Some people’s blameless lives are to blame for a good deal.” – Dorothy Sayers

“What are you to do with the people who are cursed with both hearts and brains?” ― Dorothy L. Sayers (Gaudy Night)

“The great advantage about telling the truth is that nobody ever believes it.” – Dorothy Sayers

“If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” – G. K. Chesterton

“Academics have always been afflicted by unusually high levels of conformity to expectations: one of the chief ways you prove yourself worthy of an academic life is by getting very good grades, and you don’t get very good grades without saying the sorts of things that your professors like to hear.” ― Alan Jacobs (How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds)

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life.” – George Eliot (Middlemarch)

“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” – George Eliot (Middlemarch)

“What we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.” – George Eliot (Middlemarch)