“There is no better proof of human vanity than to consider the causes and effects of love, because the whole universe can be changed by it. Cleopatra’s nose.”
Pascal Pensées
“What is the real corrective to the condition in which shocking things do not shock the earnest and ethical people who do them? And how can we make it clear to those who are so inconsistent as not to be wicked men that they are very consistently doing wicked things?”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 28, 1917, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
“Well, I made up my mind, but I made it up both ways.”
Casey Stengel according to Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 #2 (Oct./Nov. 2001)
“‘Intense without being tense’ is a hitting motto I like to stress.”
Joe Torre in Joe Torre and Nolan Ryan Torre with Joel Cohen, Pitching and Hitting.
“the devil is a saint without humility. He is as austere as any anchorite; he is as intellectual as any doctor or theologian; he is as refined as any lady abbess; he is as sexless as any virgin martyr. The one difference between him and them is that he is an egoist; an austere, refined, intellectual, virgin egoist.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Feb. 3, 1906 quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 (March-April 2022)
“It is absolutely not true that Philadelphians boo homely brides and clumsy pall-bearers. I was born and raised in Philly, and I know. It may be true that they once booed the Easter Bunny...”
Bob Levin in Maclean’s Oct. 25, 1993
“Wisdom is a virtue, not a talent, and so it is not the same as mere intelligence.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]
“it must be said that since the birth of the most famous of analysts, Prince Hamlet, analysis, as the supreme quality of a character, is never divorced from Hamletism. That is, an intellect that dominates everything is a source of softening of the will and indecisiveness in action. With Martov, who was a thinking apparatus par excellence, the centers of restraint were too strong to allow him the free and reckless acts of combat, the revolutionary feats that no longer demand the reason, but only the will.”
Nikolai N. Sukhanov The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal record by N.N. Sukhanov