“It’s not whether you win or lose; it’s how you place the blame.”
Oscar Wilde [widely quoted online but I do not have a more precise attribution].
In my latest Mercatornet article I say that what matters in the upcoming U.S. election is not what the people involved would have you focus on.
“Carissimi, when praised for the ease and grace of his melodies, exclaimed, ‘Ah! you little know with what difficulty this ease has been acquired.’ Sir Joshua Reynolds, when once asked how long it had taken him to paint a certain picture, replied, ‘All my life.’”
Samuel Smiles Self-Help
“It is the peasants who preserve all traditions of the sites of battles or the building of churches. It is they who remember, so far as anyone remembers, the glimpses of fairies or the graver wonders of saints. In the classes above them the supernatural has been slain by the supercilious. That is a true and tremendous text in Scripture which says that ‘where there is no vision the people perish.’ But it is equally true in practice that where there is no people the visions perish.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News, July 30, 1910, quoted in “GKC on Scripture – Conducted by Peter Floriani” “Proverbs Part 2” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the G.K. Chesterton Society Vol. 25 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2022)
“Outspirational.”
Me on something that absolutely failed to engage my enthusiasm February 2000.
“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”
C.S. Lewis, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email teaser September 4, 2022.
“Lord Salisbury’s observation that ‘no lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust in experts’”
Michael Mandelbaum in New York Times June 16, 1985 [and widely quoted online but not, in any examples I found, with further attribution as to when or where Salisbury said it].
“As Chesterton put it ‘Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good.’ Ivan [Karamazov] may seem as though he is tired of evil, but through his disdain for evil, he rejects not what is evil, but what is good.”
Fred Berg in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)