“Learn to pause, or nothing worthwhile can catch up to you.”
Unknown [widely cited, sometimes as a Zen koan, without further attribution]
“’I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done, as long as I enjoyed it at the time,’ she [Katharine Hepburn] once said. That really is not a sound thought, and not even worldly…. If he enjoyed the rape, he should feel no regret for having done it?”
William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review August 11, 2003
“with every baby a new sun and a new moon are made.”
The spirit of Adam Wayne in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“She can never again take a step on to green grass without wondering if it is bog.”
Josephine Tey, The Franchise Affair (regarding a character who experienced a sudden personal betrayal)
“Dig the well before we’re thirsty…”
Alan Sager, Professor of Health Services, Director, Health Reform Program, Boston University School of Public Health, “How to Shape Health Care Technology We Can Afford,” presented to “Affording Health Care’s Future” Massachusetts Association of Health Plans Second Annual Conference, Boston, November 21, 2003 [please do not ask me how such a thing got into my notes]
“The lover enjoys the moment, but precisely not for the moment’s sake. He enjoys it for the woman’s sake, or his own sake. The warrior enjoys the moment, but not for the sake of the moment; he enjoys it for the sake of the flag. The cause which the flag stands for may be foolish and fleeting; the love may be calf-love, and last for a week. But the patriot thinks of the flag as eternal; the lover thinks of his love as something that cannot end. These moments are filled with eternity; these moments are joyful because they do not seem momentary…. Man cannot love mortal things. He can only love immortal things for an instant.”
G.K. Chesterton Heretics
“The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.”
G.K. Chesterton, in Illustrated London News Feb. 2, 1924, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 #7 (June 1999)
“When the locusts come, they devour everything.”
Bob Uecker and Mickey Herskowitz. Catcher in the Wry