Misfortune comes to all men.

Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man
But for one man who can stand prosperity
There are a hundred that will stand adversity
Thomas Carlyle
***
When a man gets to despair
He knows that all his thinking will never get him out
He will only get out by the sheer creative effort of God
Consequently he is in the right attitude to receive from God
That which he cannot gain for himself.
Oswald Chambers
***
Suffering has always been with us
Does it really matter in what form it comes?
All that matters is how we bear it
And how we fit it into our lives
Etty Hillesum
***
Adversity is the state
In which man most easily becomes acquainted with himself
Being especially free of admirers then
Samuel Johnson
***
Things don’t go wrong and break your heart
So you can become bitter and give up
They happen to break you down and build you up
So you can be all that you were intended to be
Charles Jones
***
What really counts
Is not the immediate act of courage or of valor
But those who bear the struggle day in and day out
John F. Kennedy

Autobiographies ought to begin with Chapter Two

The life of every man
Is a diary
In which he means to write one story
And writes another
And his humblest hour
Is when he compares the volume
As it is with what he hoped to make it
James M. Barrie
***
A man’s memory
Is bound to be a distortion of his past
In accordance with his present interests
And the most faithful autobiography
Is likely to mirror l
Lss what a man was
Than what he has become
Fawn M. Brodie
***
Reminiscences
Even extensive ones
Do not always amount to an autobiography
For autobiography has to do with time
With sequence and what makes up the continuous flow of life
Here, I am talking of a space
Of moments and discontinuities
For even if months and years appear here
It is in the form they have in the moment of recollection
This strange form
It may be called fleeting or eternal
Is in neither case the stuff
That life is made of
Walter Benjamin
***
There are people who can write their memoirs
With a reasonable amount of honesty
And there are people
Who simply cannot take themselves seriously enough
I think I might be the first to admit
That the sort of reticence
Which prevents a man from exploiting his own personality
Is really an inverted sort of egotism
Raymond Chandler

Wine makes a man better pleased with himself

The first glass is for myself
The second for my friends
The third for good humor
And the forth for my enemies
Sir William Temple
***
Wine gives a man nothing
It neither gives him knowledge nor wit
It only animates a man
And enables him to bring out
What a dread of the company has repressed
It only puts in motion what had been locked up in frost
Samuel Johnson
***
Wine makes a man better pleased with himself
I do not say that it makes him more pleasing to others
This is one of the disadvantages of wine
It makes a man mistake words for thoughts
Samuel Johnson
***
Thanks be to God
Since my leaving the drinking of wine
I do find myself much better
And do mind my business better
And do spend less money
And less time lost in idle company
Samuel Pepys
***
It provokes the desire
But it takes away the performance
Therefore much drink
May be said to be an equivocator with lechery
It makes him and it mars him
It sets him on and it takes him off
William Shakespeare
***
If all be true that I do think
There are five reasons we should drink
Good wine
A friend
Or being dry
Or lest we should be by and by
Or any other reason why
Henry Aldrich
***
Alcohol is necessary for a man
So that he can have a good opinion of himself
Undisturbed be the facts
Finley Peter Dunne
***
Other countries drink to get drunk
And this is accepted by everyone
In France, drunkenness is a consequence
Never an intention
A drink is felt as the spinning out of a pleasure
Not as the necessary cause of an effect which is sough
Wine is not only a philter
It is also the leisurely act of drinking
Roland Barthes
***
It is immoral to get drunk
Because the headache comes after the drinking
But if the headache came first and the drunkenness afterwards
It would be moral to get drunk
Samuel Butler
***
Alcohol doesn’t console
It doesn’t fill up anyone’s psychological gaps
All it replaces is the lack of God
It doesn’t comfort man
On the contrary, it encourages him in his folly
It transports him to the supreme regions
Where he is master of his own destiny
Marguerite Duras