In my latest Epoch Times column I outline what we should try to do to improve 2023 come what may.
“I believe I am responsible precisely as I believe I am awake. If I choose to say that I was at this moment in a dream, and it did not matter what I did, nobody could possibly offer any final proof that I was not in a dream. This is plain, for the simple reason that no one could offer any proof that might not be offered in a dream. But if I ate all the family’s breakfast, and then told them they were a dream family, you would say simply that I was mad. That is all that real philosophy has to say about a determinist – he is mad. ‘Mad’ does not mean stupid or illogical, or without arguments; madmen always have excellent arguments. ‘Mad’ means fixed in a mental position which cannot be reconciled with actual human life. Any belief is insane, which makes most of a man's human words and acts unmeaning…”
G.K. Chesterton in The London Opinion June 9, 1906, reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)
“I took up my gun, my notebook, and my pencils, and went forth to the woods as gaily as if nothing had happened. I felt pleased that I might now make better drawings than before; and, ere a period not exceeding three years had elapsed, my portfolio was again filled.”
John James Audubon, the ornithologist, quoted in Samuel Smiles Self-Help (on how he had left 200 original drawings, the work of years, in a wooden box with a relative in Kentucky for a business trip to Philadelphia only to find on his return several months later that Norway rats had nested in the box and eaten them all. He did have several dark days before rebounding.) Smiles mentions that when Sir Isaac Newton’s papers were burned when his dog upset a lit taper on his desk Newton did not recover so well, but also the incident where Thomas Carlyle lent the first volume of his history of the French Revolution “to a literary neighbour to peruse”, namely John Stuart Mill, and the latter’s maid somehow put it into the fire, whereupon Carlyle rewrote it and it did indeed make his reputation.
“Chesterton calls Jerusalem, ‘the shoulder of the world,’ a place that demonstrates the truth of ‘the hardest of all the hard sayings of supernaturalism: that there is such a thing as holy and unholy ground.’”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #5 (March 2004) discussing [and I presume quoting] G.K. Chesterton’s 1920 account of his travels to Palestine in The New Jerusalem
“It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.”
Dag Hammarskjold, quoted in Stephen Covey The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
“It must be remembered that, though concord is in itself better than discord, discord may indicate a better state of things than is indicated by concord. Calamity and peril often force men to combine. Prosperity and security often encourage them to separate.”
Thomas Babington Macaulay The History of England
“The chief aim of order is to give room for good things to run wild.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted as header quotation by Fr. Robert Wild in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)
“The more intelligent one is, the more men of originality one finds. Ordinary people find no difference between men.”
Pascal Pensées