“Nobody really cares if you're miserable so you might as well be happy.”
Cynthia Nelms, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail July 24, 2009
“I did not so much mind the pessimist who complained that there was so little good. But I was furious, even to slaying, with the pessimist who asked what was the good of good.”
G.K. Chesterton, “Reflections on [The Man Who Was] Thursday” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #8 (July-August 2007)
“Happy is he who still loves something that he loved in the nursery: he has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and has saved not only his soul but his life.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Sept. 26, 1908, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #2 (Issue 75) Oct.-Nov. 2006
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
This quotation is hard to source because it seems to originate with Roger Sessions in 1950. But Sessions said Einstein had said it "in effect" and since then it has been very widely attributed to Einstein because who ever heard of Roger Sessions (I hadn’t; turns out he was a composer) whereas Einstein’s the guy with the giant brain and hairdo to match. The Quote Investigator says while Einstein did express this idea at various times it is probably Sessions who, while deflecting the credit, actually created the concise, beloved and much quoted version above.
“Strangely bad reasoning: ‘God hasn’t stopped human beings from committing evil. Therefore I withdraw my faith from God and place it in human beings instead.’”
J. Budziszewski "Underground Thomist" email Feb. 25, 2019.
“If the real girl is experiencing a real romance, she is experiencing something old, but not something stale.”
G.K. Chesterton “The Real Problem with Sentimental Art” reprinted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #6
“To say that something is ‘natural’ means not that it is inevitable, but that the potential for it exists in the genotype. This in turn implies that it is merely prudent to bear in mind the potential of that ‘natural’ behavior and act accordingly. [Robert] Wright approvingly cites Francis Bacon, who announced, ‘Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.’”
Lionel Tiger reviewing Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny in National Review March 6, 2000
“I have also never met a successful pessimist.”
William J. O’Neill, cited in The American Spectator August 1988