“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
Mark Twain, quoted in Maclean’s July 28, 2003 (and in “Yet More Mark Twain Quotables” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #2 (Oct.-Nov. 2004)
“The trouble with Catholics is that they like to have things proved; wherein they differ from a more advanced and enlightened world. Alone among modern people, they do not think that a thing being talked about is the same as its being proved.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness April 13, 1923, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“Doughnut-Americans”
Another of mine, from June 30, 2001, on the intersectionality of obesity and what was then “political correctness” and is now “woke”.
“The clouds above us join and separate,/ The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns./ Life is like that, so why not relax?/ Who can stop us from celebrating?”
The poet Lu Yu, cited in Benjamin Hoff The Tao of Pooh
“David S. Muzzey put the problem well when he compared the individual to the waist of an hour-glass, standing ‘at the apex of a pyramid whose base broadens downward through descendants at the apex of a pyramid whose base broadens upward through ancestors’. In Muzzey’s image, every historically significant man is ‘focal’, gathering the experience of the past into himself and sending forth ‘widening rays of influence’ into the future. ‘The task of the biographer,’ he concluded, is ‘to calculate the resultant of the forces’, which consist of the personality of the subject and ‘the problems of the times in which he lived’.”
John A. Garratty The Nature of Biography
“They talk a great deal about education, because it is compulsory education. Whether or no they can educate, they are always eager to compel. But as a fact their aim is the very contrary of education. It is the destruction of education, and even of experience. It is to make men forget the past, forget the facts, forget the very memories of their own lives. And if their compulsory culture spreads successfully, it is very likely that we shall be alone in knowing what was known to every man, woman and child, in the hour of our danger and deliverance.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness Sept. 24, 1920, quoted in standalone boxed quotations headed “Education” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“At forty he [the villain, Jack Bolt] was an embittered man who blamed the world for the success that had never come to him, failing to understand that the fault was his own. He was one of those who had always wanted to start at the top, and the idea of consistent effort to get there had seemed futile to him.”
Louis L’Amour The Riders of High Rock
“Distance doesn’t matter. It is only the first step that is difficult.”
Marquise du Deffand, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail October 18, 2002