“Industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin.”
Hesiod, quoted in Maclean’s July 28, 2003
“The Church is the only institution that ever attempted to create a machinery of pardon. The Church is the only thing that ever attempted by system to pursue and discover crimes, not in order to avenge, but in order to forgive them. The stake and rack were merely the weaknesses of the religion; its snobberies, its surrenders to the world. Its specialty – or, if you like, its oddity – was this merciless mercy; the unrelenting sleuthhound who seeks to save and not slay.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News February 20, 1909, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“Men say indignantly that we ought not to be worrying about creeds: we ought to be worrying about education. They might as well say that we must not worry about cats, because we ought to be worrying about kittens. A kitten only means the first stage of a cat. Education only means the first stage of some creed, some view of life.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Oct. 3, 1908, quoted in standalone boxed quotations headed “Education” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“Sulking about your mistakes only leads to future ones.”
“Bill Rancic in USA Weekend” according to “Quotable Quotes” in Reader’s Digest Canadian Edition March 2005
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
Mark Twain, quoted in Maclean’s July 28, 2003 (and in “Yet More Mark Twain Quotables” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #2 (Oct.-Nov. 2004)
“The trouble with Catholics is that they like to have things proved; wherein they differ from a more advanced and enlightened world. Alone among modern people, they do not think that a thing being talked about is the same as its being proved.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness April 13, 1923, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the Peel District School Board purging all books written before 2008 is a worrying red flag about what’s happening in government schools… and I do mean red.
“The clouds above us join and separate,/ The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns./ Life is like that, so why not relax?/ Who can stop us from celebrating?”
The poet Lu Yu, cited in Benjamin Hoff The Tao of Pooh