The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, r. Mar. 2015

p. 25 We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear. There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.

p. 50 All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary. The real question is how to prepare for the Enemy's counterattack.

p. 67 …active habits are strengthened be repitition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.

p. 71 The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour's talents - or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall. He wants each man, in the long run, to be able te recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things.

p. 94 The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not anther self…. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same…. He aims at a contradiction. Things are to be many, yet somehow also one. The good of one self is to be the good of another. This impossibility he calls love, and this monotonous panacea can be detected under all He does and even all He is - or claims to be.

p. 101 If we could only find out what He is really up to! Hypothesis after hypothesis has been tried, and still we can't find out. Yet we must never lose hope; more and more complicated theories, fuller and fuller collections of data, richer rewards for researchers who make progress, more and more terrible punishments for those who fail - all this, pursued and accelerated to the very end of time, cannot, surely, fail to succeed.

p. 112 You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption 'My time is my own'. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours…. The man can neither make, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as chattels.

p. 113 Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they 'own' thieir bodies - those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds…

p. 133 I am not in the least interested in knowing how many people in England have been killed by bombs. In what state of mind they died, I can learn from the office at this end. That they were going to die sometime, I knew already.

p. 139 We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain - not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

p. 150 …the Enemy does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing somenthing is not to make him do it.

p. 151 To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge - to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour - this would be rejected as unutterably single-minded.

p. 169 Your patient, properly handled, will have no difficulty in regarding his emotion at the sight of human entrails as a revelation of Reality and his emotion at the sight of happy children or fair weather as mere sentiment.

p. 203 The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic'. These differences between the pupils - for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences - must be disguised.

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble by Zac Bissonnette, r. Mar. 2015

p. 99 "There is nothing so disturbing to one's well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich." -Charles Kindleberger

p. 133 "What is sought with difficulty is discovered with more pleasure." -St. Augustine

Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl, r. Mar. 2015

p. xvi The Kon-Tiki expedition opened my eyes to what the ocean really is. It is a conveyer and not an isolator. The ocean has been man's highway from the days he built the first buoyant ships, long before he tamed the horse, invented wheels, and cut roads through the virgin jungles.

p. 9 Once in a while you find yourself in an odd situation. You get into it by degrees and in the most natural way but, when you are right in the midst of it, you are suddenly astonished and ask yourself how in the world it all came about.

p. 22 Modern research demands that every branch shall dig its own hole. It's not usual for anyone to sort out what comes up out of the holes and try to put it all together.

p. 132 The world was simple - stars in the darkness. Whether it was 1947 B.C. or A.D. suddenly became of no significance. We lived, and that we felt with alert intensity. We realized that life had been full for men before the technical age also - in fact, fuller and richer in many ways than the life of modern man. Time and evolution somehow ceased to exist; all that was real and that mattered were the same today as they had always been and would always be. We were swallowed up in the absolute common measure of history - endless unbroken darkness under a swarm of stars.