“Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly”
Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria quoted in Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“Weak if we were and foolish/ Not thus we failed, not thus;/ When that black Baal blocked the heavens/ He had no hymns from us.”
The introductory poem in G.K Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton
“The drivers ahead of us appear to be descended from monkeys who weren’t making it as monkeys.”
Me in traffic on the afternoon of December 17, 2024
“For admirers, the unusual challenge is to popularize a man who didn’t lie, steal or cheat on his wife. What do they say?”
Andrew Cohen about George Washington in Globe & Mail March 3, 1999
“That the issue of sexual morality should become a vehicle of rebellion against bourgeois values for the modern movement was inevitable. In the art of Gustav Klimt, in the early operas of Richard Strauss, in the plays of Frank Wedekind, in the personal antics of Verlaine, Tchaikovsky, and Wilde, and even in the relaxed morality of the German youth movement, a motif of eroticism dominated the search for newness and change. In the United States Max Eastman shouted, ‘Lust is sacred!’ The sexual rebel, particularly the homosexual, became a central figure in the imagery of revolt, especially after the ignominious treatment Oscar Wilde received at the hands of the establishment. Of her Bloomsbury circle of gentle rebels Virginia Woolf said, ‘the word bugger was never far from our lips.’ Andre Gide, after a long struggle with himself, denounced publicly le mensonge des moeurs, the moral life, and admitted his own predilections. Passion and love, he had concluded, were mutually exclusive. And passion was much purer than love. Diaghilev’s sexual proclivities were well known, and he made no attempt to mask them; quite the reverse. Stravinsky said later that Diaghilev’s entourage was ‘a kind of homosexual Swiss Guard.’”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era [so the modern rebellion over the issue of sexual morality is actually stale and reactionary]
“The secret to each fool, that he’s an ass”
“Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” in Alexander Pope Essay on Man and Other Poems [and yes, a precursor of the Dunning-Kruger effect]
“It taught me to be more sure of myself. The doughnut taught me to realize who I am.”
Ed Atwell, entrepreneur and inventor of the Sunnymoon doughnut, on the merits of entrepreneurship, quoted in Ottawa Citizen June 29, 2006
“I go slap through a roomful of MSS., criticizing deuced conscientiously, with the result that I post back some years of MSS. to addresses, which I should imagine, must be private asylums.”
G.K. Chesterton writing to E.C. Bentley (the Clerihew guy) in 1895 describing his workday and the various tasks he undertakes for a publishing house, Redway, including clearing a backlog of manuscripts, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton