There is, or at least was then, a “Saskatchewan-based International Society for the Promotion of Procrastination. Visitors [to its web site] are told that prospective members (the only kind they have, it’s noted) should put their personal information as well as an unsigned cheque (post-dated, of course) into an envelope and send it to an address in Findlater, Sask. Alas, when one clicks to open the society’s alleged postal code, nothing happens.”
Maclean’s July 7, 2003
“As always, Chesterton says it best: ‘How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it … You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky in a street full of splendid strangers.’”
John Walker in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“From fat your iniquity proceeds.”
The soul in Piers Plowman Passus XV l. 318
“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (1954), quoted in Maclean’s September 9, 1996
“‘His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times: his virtues were his own.’“
Edward Gibbon on Belisarius, cited in George F. Kennan American Diplomacy 1900-1950
“it will be well to remember that when a rigid officialism breaks in upon the voluntary compromises of the home, that officialism itself will be only rigid in its action and will be exceedingly limp in its thought.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted without further source in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“But I remained incommunicado, if you please, in a hole of my own making. And what fun is there in hiding when no one’s looking for you?”
Frank Capra The Name Above the Title [about having withdrawn from the world of film, having lost his nerve].
“Industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin.”
Hesiod, quoted in Maclean’s July 28, 2003