“It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.” G.K. Chesterton in Charles Dickens
“Wit is a fighting thing and a working thing.”
G.K. Chesterton in praise of Mark Twain on the latter’s death according to Gilbert! Vol. 5 #8 (July/August 2002)
“Unhurt people are not much good in the world.”
Irish literary critic Enid Starkie, quoted in “Social Studies” in the Globe and Mail Dec. 11, 2007 (parenthetically, I would not have thought there were enough of them for it to matter)
“The first edition of the Dictionary of the French Academy published in 1694, defined history as the ‘narration of actions and of matters worth remembering.’ The eighth edition, in 1935, said much the same: ‘the account of acts, of events, of matters worth remembering.’”
John Lukacs At the End of an Age p. 51n [oddly, in this otherwise excellent book, Lukacs indignantly rejects this definition – but for once I’m with the French Academy on this one].
“economist, n. a scoundrel whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. – after Ambrose Bierce”
Daniel K. Benjamin in PERC Reports Vol. 17 # 5 (12/99) p. 16 [Bierce, himself one, had defined a “cynic” that way in his Devil’s Dictionary].
“You cannot run away from a weakness. You must sometimes fight it out or perish; and if it be so, why not now, and where you stand?”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“AMBITION, n. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.” Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
William James “discovered among those who had experienced the most profound religious states a virtually universal tendency toward what he called ‘monism’ and ‘optimism.’ Fundamental bedrock reality is both unified and good.”
William Bennett The Book of Virtues