“In other words, baseball’s highest value – at least during those hours on the field – is the ability to achieve a blend of intensity and underlying serenity which, in daily life, we might call mental health.”
Thomas Boswell How Life Imitates The World Series
“Richmond has a well-deserved reputation for being a hotbed of social rest.”
A famous American pundit whose name I failed to record on PBS October 15, 1992
“WHEN I WAS IN WARSAW I had occasion to pass and re-pass the statue of Copernicus… He sits there with his astronomical globe, looking down the main thoroughfare of the newly-liberated capital of his country… He has always been one of the great glories of Poland; though I am aware that the German professors have attempted to prove that he was really a German. But as they have done the same for Virgil, Dante, and the Twelve Apostles, I am inclined to think tradition has more of the sobriety of truth.”
G.K. Chesterton “On Three Names” reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
In my latest National Post column I say historical amnesia seems to be Canada’s new national policy and slogan, driven by politicians who know they cannot withstand comparison with figures from the past.
“What is the real corrective to the condition in which shocking things do not shock the earnest and ethical people who do them? And how can we make it clear to those who are so inconsistent as not to be wicked men that they are very consistently doing wicked things?”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 28, 1917, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
“Well, I made up my mind, but I made it up both ways.”
Casey Stengel according to Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 #2 (Oct./Nov. 2001)
“‘Intense without being tense’ is a hitting motto I like to stress.”
Joe Torre in Joe Torre and Nolan Ryan Torre with Joel Cohen, Pitching and Hitting.
“it must be said that since the birth of the most famous of analysts, Prince Hamlet, analysis, as the supreme quality of a character, is never divorced from Hamletism. That is, an intellect that dominates everything is a source of softening of the will and indecisiveness in action. With Martov, who was a thinking apparatus par excellence, the centers of restraint were too strong to allow him the free and reckless acts of combat, the revolutionary feats that no longer demand the reason, but only the will.”
Nikolai N. Sukhanov The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal record by N.N. Sukhanov