“For parents who would take a scorched-earth approach to religion...”
Janet Scott Barlow in Chronicles magazine September 1991
“One can always tell when one is getting old and serious by the way that holidays seem to interfere with one’s work.”
“Bob Edwards in the Calgary Eye Opener, 1913” quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail August 5, 2002
“The great moralists of the past – Aristotle, Cicero, St. Thomas, and Samuel Johnson – all had this in common, a willingness to face the facts about the human race without despairing...”
An author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine April 1988 [the piece continued “and it is to that company that Joseph Pieper belongs” and I assume it was a book review]
“We have to realize that the child’s world is without economic purpose. A child doesn’t understand – happy ignorance – that people are paid to do things. To a child the policeman rules the street for self-important majesty; the furnace man stokes the furnace because he loves the noise of falling coal and the fun of getting dirty; the grocer is held to his counter by the lure of aromatic spices and the joy of giving. And in this very ignorance there is a grain of truth. The child’s economic world may be the one that we are reaching out in vain to find. Here is a path in the wood of economics that some day might be followed to new discovery. Meantime, the children know it well and gather beside it their flowers of beautiful illusion.”
“War-Time Santa Claus” in Stephen Leacock On the Front Line of Life
“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
Aldous Huxley, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail February 23, 2011
“More haste, less speed”
Pandar to Troilus in Chaucer Troilus and Criseyde (of course in the translation... by Gollum among others).
“The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Roman Converts” in Dublin Review, January/March 1925, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #8 (July/August 2001)
“They were like cockroaches. It wasn’t what they ate or carried off, it was what they fell into and ruined.”
Bob Uecker and Mickey Herskowitz Catcher in the Wry (re losing to the hapless New York Mets in 1964)