“The chief error of these people is to be found in the very phrase to which they are most attached – ‘plain living and high thinking.’… They would be improved by high living and plain thinking. A little high living (I say, having a full sense of responsibility, a little high living) would teach them the force and meaning of the human festivities, of the banquet that has gone on from the beginning of the world.”
G.K. Chesterton Heretics
“The simple truth would still cause a considerable sensation. It is the one shock for which the world is still waiting.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness January 6, 1923, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2022)
“Quit while you’re behind.”
Another of mine, from August 6, 2004, inspired by entering the quotation that was published on August 1 2023.
“With his absolute faith in his own baseball eye, and his coaches’ ability to polish skills, [Earl] Weaver manages as though victory were an inevitability.”
Thomas Boswell How Life Imitates The World Series
Dolly “Parton writes songs, which is one artistic expression of storytelling — poetry adorned by the mathematics of music.... Preachers tell stories, too; stories about truths that change history. We preach the Word, and ‘in the beginning the Word and the Word was God.’ God is the first storyteller, and the angels the first song-tellers. A story endures to the extent that it conveys an enduring truth. That’s why so many songs are about love — desired, despairing, requited, unrequited, honoured, betrayed. Love is what most endures. The Jews taught the world about stories that make present now what God wrote in history, which is why their greatest collection of stories opens with ‘In the beginning.’ ‘Once upon a time’ is the usual way to do it, but doesn’t fit when time has not yet been created.”
Fr. Raymond J. de Souza in National Post December 24, 2022
“‘Life is short, so I shall eat butter,’ is India’s counterpart to ‘Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.’”
My source for this one is “H. Smith WRM” but what it means I do not know; I failed to record it in my Bibliography file. Possibly it’s a misprint for Hyrum W. Smith’s What Matters Most.
“Stories that get worse as they get longer.”
Me August 5, 2004 re some now-forgotten episode involving Dalton McGuinty and André Ouellet.
“I never had the same determination about baseball, and maybe that was my undoing. No matter how badly I wanted to get a base hit, I knew the other guy was trying to stop me. And I might be overmatched. In front of an audience, no one can stop me but myself.”
Bob Uecker and Mickey Herskowitz Catcher in the Wry