“When the tide is receding from the beach it is easy to have the illusion that one can empty the ocean by removing water with a pail.”
Rene Dubos, quoted in Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emergent Diseases in a World out of Balance
“It is one of the deep jokes of existence that very wise people and very ignorant people frequently say the same thing; perhaps it is the basis of democracy.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Feb. 23, 1907, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
“Rachel, you’re a long way from desperate.” “I may not be there but I’m on the bus.”
An exchange on a short-lived sitcom called “Flesh ‘n’ Blood” that I apparently watched on Oct. 11, 1991 for reasons I could not possibly now begin to explain.
“During the 19th century, and through much of the early 20th, Hamlet was regarded as Shakespeare’s central and most significant play, because it dramatized a central preoccupation of the age of Romanticism: the conflict of consciousness and action; the sense of consciousness as a withdrawal from action which could make for futility, and yet was all that could prevent action from becoming totally mindless.”
Northrop Frye Northrop Frye on Shakespeare
“There are no bad things, only bad uses of things.”
G.K. Chesterton “in his book on St. Thomas Aquinas” quoted by Gabriel Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023) [but in defence of AI which I suspect may test that rule severely]
“No good was ever done by one-sided controversy.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness August 2, 1918, quoted in “Chesterton For Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
“We do not see in the past a perpetual line of increasing liberation or enlargement of artistic experiment. What we see in the past is the much more human business of men first doing something badly; then doing it well; then doing it too well – or, at least, too easily and too often. Then they commonly begin to do something else; but the thing is much more often an old thing than a new thing.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Novelty in Art” in Illustrated London News October 6, 1928, reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023) [critiquing “the rather antiquated theory of progress”.]
“the thousand-yard stare...”
C.S. Crawford, The Four Deuces: A Korean War Story