“the time-honored axiom that if something is not worth doing, it is not worth doing right.”
Dave Barry Dave Barry’s Bad Habits
“Blessed is he who has found his work. Let him ask no other blessedness.”
Thomas Carlyle, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience [and doubtless many others; those are just the two in my files].
“A million kids want to clean up the earth. A million parents want them to start with their rooms.”
Emailed by a friend without attribution
“To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes the woman – she understands. To say what she understands is beyond me; save only this, that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as run…. This is that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female, drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it. She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable. She was maintaining the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
G.K. Chesterton What’s Wrong with the World
“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly – at first.”
Dick Karpinski, quoted in Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems
“In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic; now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.”
G.K. Chesterton, as header quotation on inaugural column by Brent Forrest, who was a professional magician, not further attributed, in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)
“It is impossible to caricature that which caricatures itself.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Dec. 16, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“We have not any need to rebel against antiquity; we have to rebel against novelty.”
G.K. Chesterton “The Eternal Revolution” in Orthodoxy quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)