“The true secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life.”
William Morris, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email teaser August 20, 2022
“Meanderthal: A person who walks particularly slowly and aimlessly, often toting cellphones and delaying pedestrian or motor traffic.”
“Social Studies” in Globe & Mail January 6, 2006
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
Henry Ford on the witness stand in 1919 during his libel suit against the Chicago Tribune, quoted in Clifton Fadiman, ed., The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes [which as I may have complained before was in fact big and blue]. These words are the apparently origin of his supposed “History is bunk”, and I quote them not because I agree but on the contrary because they embodies a typical progressive fatuity that nothing ever mattered before yet what we do can matter by sheer force of will... and because I want to add that in The Illusion of Technique William Barrett quoted it as “History is the bunk”, which I find interesting because older uses of that term invariably seem to have it as “the bunk” and if anyone knows how or why it got shortened or what the original reference even was I would be interested.
In my latest Mercatornet article I say that what matters in the upcoming U.S. election is not what the people involved would have you focus on.
“Carissimi, when praised for the ease and grace of his melodies, exclaimed, ‘Ah! you little know with what difficulty this ease has been acquired.’ Sir Joshua Reynolds, when once asked how long it had taken him to paint a certain picture, replied, ‘All my life.’”
Samuel Smiles Self-Help
“It is the peasants who preserve all traditions of the sites of battles or the building of churches. It is they who remember, so far as anyone remembers, the glimpses of fairies or the graver wonders of saints. In the classes above them the supernatural has been slain by the supercilious. That is a true and tremendous text in Scripture which says that ‘where there is no vision the people perish.’ But it is equally true in practice that where there is no people the visions perish.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News, July 30, 1910, quoted in “GKC on Scripture – Conducted by Peter Floriani” “Proverbs Part 2” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the G.K. Chesterton Society Vol. 25 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2022)
“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
C.S. Lewis, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email teaser September 4, 2022.
“‘The Woman King’ may not be 100% factual. But that doesn’t stop it from being a must-see./ Some have criticized it for not telling the full extent to which the Dahomey kingdom participated in the slave trade, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a powerful film.”
Headline and deck on NBC “Think” “Culture & Lifestyle” piece September 16, 2022 [www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/the-woman-king-may-not-be-100-percent-factual-but-its-a-must-see-rcna48103] and which I quote, obviously, not because I sympathize but because I think it’s a characteristically unashamed modern assertion that if it advances a favoured cause the fact that it’s not true is of no importance.