“It was big. It tried to have a go at my feet. I threw my diving belt. He came back and bit my diving belt and then he let go. After that he came back one more time.”
Swedish diver Helena Nevalainen, who along with four others fought off Komodo dragons while stranded on a remote Indonesian island for more than a day, quoted in National Post June 9, 2008.
“No Catholic thinks he is a good Catholic; or he would by that thought become a bad Catholic. I for one am not even tempted to any illusion in that matter; I fear that very often, when I have got up early to go to Mass, I have said with a groan, Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, which, I may explain to the Moslem, is not a quotation from the Mass. But the critic here in question does not say, in the grand Lucretian manner, ‘Religion alone can persuade men to such evils.’”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly August 24, 1933, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“Life is like a piano. What you get out of it depends on how you play it.”
Tom Lehrer, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email teaser February 26, 2023
“It does not very much matter what we think of one individual lady known as Miss Marie Corelli.”
G.K. Chesterton “Why Books Become Popular” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22) [as an editor’s note explained, this contemporary of GKC’s was the best-selling author of her day, outselling Kipling, Wells, and Conan Doyle combined... but has anyone heard of her today? I certainly hadn’t.]
“The French expression qui s’excuse s’accuse...”
John O’Sullivan in National Review May 1, 1995
“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