“If a man can remember what he worried about last week, he has a very good memory.”
“Anonymous” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail March 10, 2006
“Did he make it?” “No... but he might have.”
An exchange between war correspondent Dick Ennis (Robert Mitchum) and Cpl. Jack Rabinoff (Peter Falk) in the movie Anzio about a guy who’d shown Ennis a technique for trying to get through a minefield years earlier in China (specifically by throwing large rocks to make a path and stepping on them if they hadn’t exploded)
“We don’t believe in a God any more/ Any more than in fairies or elves,/ Roll ova Jehova we don’ need a prime mova/ We only believe in Ourselves.”
Part of a poem “The Scientist’s Lament” by John Seymour quoted in Joseph Pearce Literary Converts
“Of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is the man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”
G.K. Chesterton in Tremendous Trifles
“I’ve lived a long life and seen a lot of hard times… most of which never happened.”
“Mark Twain Quotables” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #8 (Issue 57, July-August 2004)
“The world stands aside to let anyone pass who knows where he is going.”
David Starr Jordan (emailed by a friend and widely quoted online).
“Is there a possibility that the government of nations may fall into the hands of men who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fireflies, and that this all is without a father?”
John Quincy Adams, in the Letters of Publicola, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind [Kirk added that the specific target was Thomas Paine and that Adams went on that rather than such an outcome “Give us again the gods of the Greeks.”]
“The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News in 1906