“Hurry! I never hurry. I have no time to hurry.”
“Igor Stravinsky, responding to his publisher’s request that he hurry his completion of a composition” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail August 6, 2004
“if Christianity were once abolished, how could the Freethinkers, the strong reasoners, and the men of profound learning be able to find another subject, so calculated in all points, whereon to display their abilities? what wonderful productions of wit should we be deprived of from those whose genius, by continual practice, has been wholly turned upon raillery and invectives against religion, and would therefore never be able to shine or distinguish themselves upon any other subject?”
Jonathan Swift “Argument Against Abolishing Christianity in England” in A Modest Proposal and Other Satirical Works
“Thanks a lot, gentlemen, and don’t let the doorknob hit you in the butt.”
Tom Wolfe The Right Stuff (I don't claim he invented this wonderful expression but it's where I first encountered it)
“travel narrows the mind.”
This quotation has been widely attributed or claimed but as far as I can determine it originated with G.K. Chesterton in his book about his 1921 trip to America; it is that source that was quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (June 2004)
“human beings, that is... psychotic apes who want to kill so much that they could not even understand an unconditional prohibition against killing, much less obey it.”
Northrop Frye The Great Code
“I suppose the terrible thing about humiliation is the certainty that one is indeed a proper object of ridicule. While it is happening we can’t feel that it will pass, that it’s only a wretched moment.”
Denis Donoghue in his autobiography Warrenpoint (based on a conversation between Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot) quoted by Irving Howe in The New Republic March 11, 1991
“Good and quickly seldom meet.”
George Herbert, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail June 16, 2010
“The real difference between the test of happiness and the test of will is simply that the test of happiness is a test and the other isn’t. You can discuss whether a man’s act in jumping over a cliff was directed towards happiness; you cannot discuss whether it was derived from will. Of course it was. You can praise an action by saying that it is calculated to bring pleasure or pain to discover truth or to save the soul. But you cannot praise an action because it shows will; for to say that is merely to say that it is an action. By this praise of will you cannot really choose one course as better than another. And yet choosing one course as better than another is the very definition of the will you are praising.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy