“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”
Oscar Wilde, in Lady Windemere’s Fan
“Think enough and you won’t know anything.”
Kenneth Patchen, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go
“It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile. We have all often spoken – Ransom himself had often spoken – of a devilish smile. Now he realized that he had never taken the words seriously. The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; It was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with a horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice as the Lady was beyond virtue.”
C.S. Lewis Perelandra [it being a devil who has possessed the body of the late scientist Edward Rolles Weston]
“What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry – but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own sceptical mind, is a doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, so long as he wrote Good Poetry.”
G.K. Chesterton in “About Poetry” in As I Was Saying quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)
“Asses would rather have refuse than gold.”
Heraclitus, quoted by an author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine November 1992
“‘Bravo, Watson! Voila la devise de notre firme: nous allons essayer en tout cas.’”
Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle Archives sur Sherlock Holmes [a 1956 translation]
“We often hear, ‘Life is short… better enjoy it’! How about, ‘Eternity is long, better prepare for it’!”
Emailed by a friend without attribution April 29, 2024.
“We know that happiness comes to men when they are caught up, absorbed in a meaningful task or duty to be done, a task or duty which in turn sheds justification and sanction back down upon their humble labors.”
Mr. Max in Richard Wright Native Son