“no one can create beauty, be it a work of art or on a golfing links, unless he has both disciplined control and the ability to let go to the sudden glimmer.”

Michael Murphy Golf in the Kingdom

“It is a very different matter when a religion, in the real sense of a binding thing, binds men to their morality when it is not identical with their mood.”

G.K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion, quoted by David Beresford in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #5 March/April 2005

“If a man may not laugh at his own jokes, at whose jokes may he laugh? May not an architect pray in his own cathedral?”

Editor’s note in Gilbert! Vol. 4 #1 (September 2000)

“A man of my sort, who has traveled about the world in rough places, gets along perfectly well with two classes, what you may call the upper and the lower. He understands them and they understand him. I was at home with herds and tramps and roadmen, and I was sufficiently at my ease with people like Sir Walter and the men I had met the night before. I can’t explain why, but it is a fact. But what fellows like me don’t understand is the great comfortable, satisfied middle-class world, the folk that live in villas and suburbs. He doesn’t know how they look at things, he doesn’t understand their conventions, and he is as shy of them as of a black mamba.”

Narrator Richard Hannay in John Buchan The 39 Steps

“A strange lot this, to be dropped down in a world of barbarians – men who see clearly enough the barbarity of all ages except their own.”

Ernest Crosbie

“Rudolf, the mad alchemist king of Bohemia, spent most of his life trying to turn base metals into gold. Even he had a sane moment, though, when he asked his famulus: ‘Tell me, if we succeed, will gold still be worth anything?’ It’s a question diploma factories rarely ask.”

George Jonas in National Post May 7, 2015

“Thus it came to him merely to run away was folly, since he could not run away from himself.”

Sinclair Lewis Babbitt

“For I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.” Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Adams, 28 October 1813