“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
E.B. White, emailed by a friend and confirmed online by e.g. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/e_b_white_106410
In my latest Epoch Times column I explain why we talk a lot less about free speech than we used to, and a lot less convincingly.
“My dad wasn’t lazy, he just had a genius for not considering the future.”
Audie Murphy, quoted in Edward F. Murphy, Heroes of World War II
“The best way out is always through.”
Robert Frost, widely cited online (and in fact it turns out to be from the rather bleak poem "A Servant to Servants" https://www.poetryverse.com/robert-frost-poems/a-servant-to-servants)
“there are aspects of our experience which hint at an incompleteness in what we are and that encourage the expectation of a fulfilment whose ground could only be in something or someone other than ourselves. Peter Berger has drawn our attention to ‘signals of transcendence’ found in every life: (a) an argument from order (essentially the intuition that history is not a tale told by an idiot; the parental role of comforting a frightened child is not the acting of a loving lie); (b) an argument from play (cheerfulness, not to say joy, keeps breaking in); (c) an argument from hope (something is held to lie in the future which is necessary to the completion of the present); (d) an argument from damnation (our outrage at Hitler and Stalin is an intuition of the transcendent moral seriousness of the world); (e) an argument from humour (there is a perceived incongruity in our experience which ‘reflects the imprisonment of the human spirit in the world’). I would want to add to these an argument from mathematics. The nature of that subject is a hotly disputed philosophical question, but for many of its practitioners its pursuit has the character of discovery rather than construction. They would agree with St Augustine that ‘men do not criticise it like examiners but rejoice in it like discoverers’. Here is the intimation of an independent world of everlasting truth which we are able to explore.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“Man is born ridiculous, as can easily be seen if you look at him soon after he is born.”
G.K. Chesterton, “Shaw, The Philosopher,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“Can’t is the father of feeble endeavor,/ The parent of terror and halfhearted work….”
Edgar Guest, “Can’t,” in William Bennett The Book of Virtues
“Many moderns treat taste as if it were a matter of morality. I can only hope that they do not treat morality as a matter of taste.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Sept. 1, 1906 quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (November-December 2021)