“Maybe if you got down off the cross there’d be room for Him.”
My reaction to someone overly prone to self-pity December 12, 2004.
There is, or at least was then, a “Saskatchewan-based International Society for the Promotion of Procrastination. Visitors [to its web site] are told that prospective members (the only kind they have, it’s noted) should put their personal information as well as an unsigned cheque (post-dated, of course) into an envelope and send it to an address in Findlater, Sask. Alas, when one clicks to open the society’s alleged postal code, nothing happens.”
Maclean’s July 7, 2003
“As always, Chesterton says it best: ‘How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it … You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky in a street full of splendid strangers.’”
John Walker in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (1954), quoted in Maclean’s September 9, 1996
“it will be well to remember that when a rigid officialism breaks in upon the voluntary compromises of the home, that officialism itself will be only rigid in its action and will be exceedingly limp in its thought.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted without further source in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“But I remained incommunicado, if you please, in a hole of my own making. And what fun is there in hiding when no one’s looking for you?”
Frank Capra The Name Above the Title [about having withdrawn from the world of film, having lost his nerve].
“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)