“This life in us... however low it flickers or fiercely burns, is still a divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives never so humane and enlightened. To suppose otherwise is to countenance a death-wish. Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.”
Malcolm Muggeridge Something Beautiful for God
“His workers liked to say that he always arrived at meetings in a freshly rumpled suit.”
Luke Sharpe in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #7 (re Leo Burnet, a great adman responsible for all sorts of icons including Tony the Tiger, the Jolly Green Giant, and the Pillsbury Doughboy)
“fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness. But I found the whole modern world running like a high tide against both my tendernesses; and the shock of that collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments, which... have since hardened into convictions. First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet…. But the great determinists of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native feeling … In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning of the world. Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were not very sure. The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are. But when I came to ask them I found they had really no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated. Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational…. one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“So prevailing is the disposition of man to quarrel and shed blood, so prone is he to divisions and parties, that even the ancient natives of this little spot [Nantucket Island] were separated into two communities, inveterately waging war against each other like the more powerful tribes of the continent…. Behold the singular destiny of the human kind, ever inferior in many instances to the more certain instinct of animals, among which the individuals of the same species are always friends, though reared in different climates…”
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur Letters from an American Farmer
“The man who is master of his passions is Reason’s slave.”
Cyril Connolly, quoted in Globe & Mail July 28, 1999
“Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death.”
James Byrnes, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail August 7, 2007
“The best doctors in the world, are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.”
Jonathan Swift, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (though Carnegie says Swift himself was “the most devastating pessimist in English literature” so not prone to taking his own advice on cheerfulness and health).
“In nine cases out of ten the human race does not know why it disapproves of cannibalism, but I know why I disapprove of it. I disapprove because I believe that man is the image of God…”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 # 3 (Dec. 2001)