“On limited lines I was making progress, but the wings of imagination still drooped nervelessly at my sides.”
Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands
“Better late than early”
From a list of maxims submitted by a Grade 3 Calgary Montessori School class, in Globe & Mail November 29, 2001
“Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.”
Max Beerbohm quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #5 (March 2006)
“people often ask me, well don’t you have faith in anything? And I always have the same answer, I do have one unshakable [faith], and that is I have an unshakable [faith] in the unreliability of man. I know that no matter what we do, some damn fool will make a mess of it.”
Garrett Hardin, quoted in Julian Simon Hoodwinking the Nation
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
John Milton, quoted in the introduction to the fence-whitewashing excerpt from Mark Twain Tom Sawyer in William Bennett The Book of Virtues
“You fail to overlook the crucial point.”
Samuel Goldwyn, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #2 Oct.-Nov. 2002
“Common sense, that extinct branch of psychology.”
G.K. Chesterton “The Unpsychological Age” in Alvaro De Silva ed., Brave New Family
“This capacity to be fully engaged in the moment yet simultaneously aware of its historic or cultural context was a special trait…”
Electra Slonimsky Yourke’s “Foreword” in Nicolas Slonimsky Perfect Pitch