“You would indeed be fortunate to get this person to work for you.”
A recommended line in a letter of recommendation for a lazy employee (I found it here but do not know where it originated).
“If the real girl is experiencing a real romance, she is experiencing something old, but not something stale.”
G.K. Chesterton “The Real Problem with Sentimental Art” reprinted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #6
“To say that something is ‘natural’ means not that it is inevitable, but that the potential for it exists in the genotype. This in turn implies that it is merely prudent to bear in mind the potential of that ‘natural’ behavior and act accordingly. [Robert] Wright approvingly cites Francis Bacon, who announced, ‘Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.’”
Lionel Tiger reviewing Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny in National Review March 6, 2000
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
E.F. Schumacher, "Small is Beautiful" (August 1973).
BTW this statement is often attributed to Albert Einstein, an online quotation magnet (like Abraham Lincoln, who famously warned us "Don't believe everything you read on the internet just because there's a picture with a quote next to it).
“I have also never met a successful pessimist.”
William J. O’Neill, cited in The American Spectator August 1988
“Suspicion: The most powerful reason why some persons want to coerce conscience – for example, to force medical workers who object to abortions to participate in them anyway – is to have as much company as possible in their own bad conscience.”
J. Budziszewski "Underground Thomist" Feb. 25, 2019
“It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world.”
G.K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades