“it apparently takes social scientists much longer than poets or critics to realize that every mind is a primitive mind, whatever the varieties of social conditioning.”
Northrop Frye The Great Code
“She can never again take a step on to green grass without wondering if it is bog.”
Josephine Tey, The Franchise Affair (regarding a character who experienced a sudden personal betrayal)
“Dig the well before we’re thirsty…”
Alan Sager, Professor of Health Services, Director, Health Reform Program, Boston University School of Public Health, “How to Shape Health Care Technology We Can Afford,” presented to “Affording Health Care’s Future” Massachusetts Association of Health Plans Second Annual Conference, Boston, November 21, 2003 [please do not ask me how such a thing got into my notes]
“The lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for the moment’s sake. He enjoys it for the woman’s sake, or his own sake. The warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he enjoys it for the sake of the flag. The cause which the flag stands for may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last for a week. But the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks of his love as something that cannot end. These moments are filled with eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary…. Man cannot love mortal things. He can only love immortal things for an instant.”
G.K. Chesterton Heretics
“Once, at a public meeting, some bad poet from out of the crowd handed Sulla an epigram the man had written about him, with every other line longer than it ought to be. Sulla, who was conducting an auction, immediately ordered a reward to be paid the scribbler from its proceeds – on the condition that he never wrote anything again!”
Cicero Selected Political Speeches
“The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.”
G.K. Chesterton, in Illustrated London News Feb. 2, 1924, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 #7 (June 1999)
“There is such a thing [as human nature], and it is not entirely tractable. Its most ominous elements are a deep vein of violence, perhaps attendant on a too-great sense of fright; a weakly developed capacity for material satisfaction, perhaps also partly due to that same sense of fright; a tendency to misjudge the difficulties of life as difficulties arising from a specified cause; and a sort of affectional inertia that puts a drag on generosity outside of a small circle of friends and kin.”
Melvin Konner The Tangled Wing: Biological constraints on the human spirit
“the observable phenomenon that trees don’t grow to the sky.”
John Dizard (“Gekko”) in National Review June 2, 1997 on the perils of projecting trends forward