“You have to have a lot of patience to learn patience.”
“Stanislaw Lec Polish writer (1909-66)” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 9, 2013
“Their art for art’s sake was a drunken variant of the stern age’s commerce for commerce’s sake, science for science’ sake.”
Garry Wills Chesterton (regarding the decadents of the 1880s and 1890s)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg’s Hidden Hand: Exposing How the Chinse Communist Party is Reshaping the World is a badly needed wakeup call, especially in Canada.
“If all things are always the same, it is because they are always heroic. If all things are always the same, it is because they are always new. To each man one soul only is given; to each soul only is given a little power – the power at some moments to outgrow and swallow up the stars. If age after age that power comes upon men, whatever gives it to them is great. Whatever makes men feel old is mean – an empire or a skin-flint shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great – a great war or a love story. And in the darkest of the books of God there is written a truth that is also a riddle. It is of the new things that men tire – of fashions and proposals and improvements and change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is the old things that are young. There is no sceptic who does not feel that many have doubted before. There is no rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his novelties are ancient. There is no worshipper of change who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of the weariness of the universe. But we who do the old things are fed by nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who is in love thinks that anyone has been in love before. No woman who has a child thinks that there have been such things as children. No people that fight for their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken empires.”
The spirit of Adam Wayne in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“[I]t is the mark of an educated man to look for precision to each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.”
Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics quoted in Walter H. Beale A Pragmatic Theory of Rhetoric
“A man who dropped out of college to join ISIS said after being captured becoming a member of the extremist group was the worst decision he’s made.”
NBC News July 27 2015 [to which one can only say “I certainly hope so”]
“’I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done, as long as I enjoyed it at the time,’ she [Katharine Hepburn] once said. That really is not a sound thought, and not even worldly…. If he enjoyed the rape, he should feel no regret for having done it?”
William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review August 11, 2003
“with every baby a new sun and a new moon are made.”
The spirit of Adam Wayne in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill