“Tension is poison.”
Charley Lau with Alfred Glossbrenner, The Winning Hitter: How to Play Championship Baseball
“It is only from a normal standpoint that all the nonsense of the world takes on something of the wild interest of wonderland.”
G.K. Chesterton’s Introduction to Fancies vs Fads quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
His home town of Hearne, SK “is so small we couldn’t afford a village idiot – everyone had to take turns.”
Allan Fotheringham in Maclean’s Oct. 25, 1999
“What is the good of words if they aren’t important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn’t any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn’t there be a quarrel about a word? If you’re not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about? Are you going to convey your meaning by moving your ears?”
G.K. Chesterton “The Peacemaker” in The Ball and the Cross, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
“Cromwell was about to ravage the whole of Christendom; the royal family was lost and his own set for ever in power, but for a little grain of sand getting into his bladder. Even Rome was about to tremble beneath him. But, with this bit of gravel once there, he died, his family fell into disgrace, peace reigned and the king was restored.”
Pascal Pensées
“We are so rooted in open and systematic morbidities, in inhuman prejudices, in respectable monomanias, that a sane man terrifies us all like a lunatic.”
G.K. Chesterton “Robert Louis Stevenson” in A Handful of Authors quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
“In other words, baseball’s highest value – at least during those hours on the field – is the ability to achieve a blend of intensity and underlying serenity which, in daily life, we might call mental health.”
Thomas Boswell How Life Imitates The World Series
“The greatest blessings we receive in life are undeserved. For example, I didn’t do anything to deserve good parents. On the other hand, it is not unjust for a person to have such a blessing, and it is not an act of justice to try to erase it. What justice requires is gratitude for blessings received. What charity requires is trying to act in a way that blessings of the same kind may be more widely enjoyed.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]