“Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition.”
W.H. Auden, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail March 7, 2002
“To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.”
George Santayana, as the header quotation on Chapter 64 in George Jonas Beethoven’s Mask
“always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?”
Gabriel Syme in G.K. Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday
“Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure.”
Don Wilder, quoted on https://www.hound-dog-media.com/2014/01/gamblers-fools-and-egotists-59-still_31.html
“it ain’t over until it’s over and then it ain’t over.”
Yogi Berra, according to Jeffrey Simpson in Globe & Mail August 14, 2001
“Laugh while you can still breathe.”
Another of mine, from March 2, 1989.
“All vulgar errors arise from education. The uneducated are generally right: the badly educated are always wrong.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness August 20, 1914, quoted in standalone boxed quotations headed “Education” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“Several excuses are always less convincing than one.”
Aldous Huxley, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail March 18, 2005