“Have you something to do to-morrow; do it to-day.”
“Benjamin Franklin (Poor Richards Almanack, 1742)” as The Patriot Post Founders’ Quote Daily May 17, 2006
Worried about trying to get rid of the appliances and other junk in her attic in these days of green disposal “I am now faced with taking them unspayed [that is, without the condensers etc. removed] to the landfill and finding out what it feels like to be rejected by a dump.”
Florence King in National Review May 3, 1999
“Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity.”
Paul Goodman, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go
“Tradition is only experience surviving death.”
G.K. Chesterton “The Leisure State” reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)
“It often happens in history that things intensely small and local, or even backward and barbaric, defend themselves with great success against empires and combines, simply because they are too remote to have been overawed by mere cosmopolitan rumour and reputation. There are some fortunate communities that are too ignorant to be bullied, too superstitious to be frightened, too poor to be bribed, and too small to be destroyed. It is probably in these minute and secret places that the seed of civilization will be preserved for future ages, through the blundering anarchy of big things which seems to be coming upon us.”
Apparently an excerpt from “The Problems with Progress” in G.K.’s Weekly Vol. 7 March-September 1928, quoted in “An Introduction to the writings of G.K. Chesterton” by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)
“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is a part of yourself. What isn’t a part of ourselves doesn’t hurt us.”
Herman Hesse in Demian, quoted by John Thompson in Mackenzie Newsletter #31 January 1998
“an early version of Horace’s carpe diem advice: ‘Seize time by the forelock.”
Pittacus of Mytilene (c. 650-570 BC) “a moderate democratic reformer…. [in] Mytilene, the chief city of the island of Lesbos” in Peter D’Epiro and Mary Desmond Pinkowish, What are the Seven Wonders of the World? and 100 Other Great Cultural Lists – Fully Explicated. [Incidentally in the 3rd Nero Wolfe novel, The Rubber Band, the early supposedly non-bookish Archie Goodwin at one point asks Wolfe “Are you going to grab time by the forelock?”
“The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not. Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican. The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons of God. Jesus Christ was crucified, it may be remembered, not because of anything he said about God, but on a charge of saying that a man could in three days pull down and rebuild the Temple. [Mt 26:61, Mk 14:58, Jn 2:19] Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness. The prophet who is stoned is not a brawler or a marplot. He is simply a rejected lover. He suffers from an unrequited attachment to things in general. (Introduction to The Defendant)”
“GKC on Scripture * Conducted by Peter Floriani” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022).