“The man who said, ‘Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed,’ put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth is, ‘Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised.’”
G.K. Chesterton discussing George Bernard Shaw in Heretics, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 #1 (Sept. 2001)
“If belief in such [religious] truth declines in general, then that species of art can never flourish again which—like the Divine Comedy, the paintings of Raphael, the frescoes of Michelangelo, the Gothic cathedrals—presupposes not only a cosmic but a metaphysical significance in the objects of art. A moving tale will one day be told how there once existed such an art, such an artist’s faith.’”
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Human, All Too Human,” quoted by Edward T. Oakes in First Things March 2001
“Every man is a d*** fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding that limit.”
Elbert Hubbard, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“Attempts must be made to modify the institutions (legal, political, social, economic) with the objective of matching these more closely with the empirical realities of man’s moral limitations.”
James Buchanan What Should Economists Do?
“Armen Alchain once made a very important comment. He said, ‘You know, there is one thing you can trust everybody to do. You can trust everybody to put his interest above yours.’”
Milton Friedman “Economic Freedom, Human Freedom, Political Freedom.” (Inaugural address of The Smith Center November 1 1991”
“Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.”
Thomas Carlyle, quoted by Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (he calls them “The twenty-one words that this young medical student read in 1871 helped him to become the most famous physician of his generation.... His name was Sir William Osier.”
“Of those who say nothing, few are silent.”
Thomas Neill quoted on https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/525050-of-those-who-say-nothing-few-are-silent
“After my warning order to the company that we would be moving off in a couple of hours I said that I was going to the communion service first. I set off by myself. Half-way there, I looked back to see if anyone else was coming and found to my surprise that virtually the whole company was following me in single file.”
My high school English teacher Stewart Bull, then a major and company commander with the Essex Scottish in Normandy in July 1944 (from his unpublished memoir Happy Warrior: Adventures in the Classroom).