“A South American idol was made as ugly as possible, as a Greek image was made as beautiful as possible. They were seeking the secret of power, by working backwards against their own nature and the nature of things. There was always a sort of yearning to carve at last, in gold or granite or the dark red timber of the forests, a face at which the sky itself would break like a cracked mirror.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Demons and the Philosophers” in The Everlasting Man, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)

“Happiness is like a young deer, fleet and beautiful. Hunt him, and he becomes a poor frantic quarry; after the kill, a piece of stinking flesh.”

Malcolm Muggeridge, quoted in Joseph Pearce Literary Converts

“I call these men [the Framers of the Constitution] heroes in deliberate defiance of the ban placed upon this word by most serious-minded historians. By hero I mean a leader of men who engages with clear eye and stout heart in an uncertain enterprise for some purpose larger than the gratification of his own ambition or the rewarding of his own friends, and whose deeds work a benevolent influence on the lives of countless other men.”

Clinton Rossiter The Grand Convention (and it was written in 1966 so this morale-destroying ban has been in place for a long time).

“I know that my plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth?”

Socrates, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” without further attribution in Epoch Times email teaser August 26, 2022.

“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