“Be not afraid of going slowly but only afraid of standing still.”
“Chinese proverb” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail December 16, 2009
“There is only one intelligent reason why a man does not believe in miracles and that is that he does believe in materialism.”
G.K. Chesterton “Miracles and Death” in St. Francis of Assisi, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4.
“If dirt was trumps, what hands you would hold!”
Charles Lamb, quoted by P.J. O’Rourke The Bachelor Home Companion
“As for Martin, he was firmly persuaded that a man is badly off wherever he is, so he suffered in patience.”
Voltaire Candide
“10 floors of basement.”
Then Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022 describing the HUD building in Washington DC designed by Bauhaus school architect Marcel Breuer.
“I try to enthuse my patients with the glory of the world, with indifferent success, I must admit. It is almost as if they wanted the world to be boring, to justify their own lack of interest in it. To be bored and disabused is taken by many people nowadays as a sign of spiritual election or superiority, as if the world does not quite come up to their exacting standards.”
Theodore Dalrymple in National Post December 27, 2003
“If you’ve got to eat an elephant, you shouldn’t be surprised if after the first few mouthfuls you’re not down to the bones.”
“Britain’s top military officer … chief of defence staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup” quoted in Ottawa Citizen Sept. 10, 2007 [at a NATO meeting, re the Afghan mission, but it remains good advice despite the ultimate debacle there].
“The function of imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders.”
G.K. Chesterton “A Defence of China Shepherdesses” in The Defendant quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (11/12/2021)