“[T]he absorption of the man and the exclusion of other matters show not how dull the subject is, but how fascinating it is. Because a man refuses to come out of Eden, they assume that he is being detained in gaol.”
G.K. Chesterton on absorption in apparently trivial hobbies, in “A Defence of Bores,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.”
Confucius, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go
“The intolerant myth may come from the fact that ‘tolerance’ is a vague term that is largely undefined. It does tend to elicit an emotional response. Tolerance is a good thing and is meant to serve justice. So if someone disagrees with me on an essential matter of the faith, I have to be very tolerant of the person, accepting and open to them, but that does not mean I should accept their ideas in a kind of moral relativism.”
“Rev. Eric Nicolai, with the communications office of Opus Dei in Montreal” asked in an e-mail conversation about the organization’s sinister image, in Ottawa Citizen October 7, 2002
“There’s a French expression that translates as: ‘When I look at myself, I despair; when I look at others, I’m consoled.’”
Paul Wells in National Post December 30, 1999
“It was my survival instinct and force of character which saved me. I never panicked, became stressed or cried. I was even singing. I went there after a little bout of depression but when I found myself suddenly trapped and in a survival situation, everything changed.”
A man found alive after five weeks trapped in underground caves in southwestern France, who survived by eating rotten wood and clay, quoted in Globe & Mail January 24, 2005.
‘‘My very dear sons, it is better never to undertake any high enterprise than to abandon it when once begun….’”
Pope Gregory, in reply to an appeal from St. Augustine of Canterbury and others to be excused from attempting to evangelize the English nation because “they were appalled at the idea of going to a barbarous, fierce, and pagan nation, of whose very language they were ignorant”, quoted in Bede A History of the English Church and People
“Re the notion that we don’t need democracy because God gave us shari’a, approving of democracy despite everything means respecting humans sufficiently to respect even their errors, as well as recognizing that your own are likely to be no less serious for being less evident to you.”
Another of mine, from December 20, 2001
“He offers a remarkable tribute to the almost forgotten truth that man is never genuinely at home except in goodness, that artistic emotions can no more refresh the nature than a liqueur can quench the thirst.’”
G.K. Chesterton (on Aleister Crowley, whose doctrines he loathed and the one person he refused to debate, but with regard to his book The Soul of Osiris), quoted by Chris Chan in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)