“Happiness is like a young deer, fleet and beautiful. Hunt him, and he becomes a poor frantic quarry; after the kill, a piece of stinking flesh.”
Malcolm Muggeridge, quoted in Joseph Pearce Literary Converts
“I know that my plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth?”
Socrates, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” without further attribution in Epoch Times email teaser August 26, 2022.
“Maybe if you got down off the cross there’d be room for Him.”
My reaction to someone overly prone to self-pity December 12, 2004.
“As always, Chesterton says it best: ‘How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it … You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky in a street full of splendid strangers.’”
John Walker in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind (1954), quoted in Maclean’s September 9, 1996
“The Church is the only institution that ever attempted to create a machinery of pardon. The Church is the only thing that ever attempted by system to pursue and discover crimes, not in order to avenge, but in order to forgive them. The stake and rack were merely the weaknesses of the religion; its snobberies, its surrenders to the world. Its specialty – or, if you like, its oddity – was this merciless mercy; the unrelenting sleuthhound who seeks to save and not slay.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News February 20, 1909, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“Men say indignantly that we ought not to be worrying about creeds: we ought to be worrying about education. They might as well say that we must not worry about cats, because we ought to be worrying about kittens. A kitten only means the first stage of a cat. Education only means the first stage of some creed, some view of life.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Oct. 3, 1908, quoted in standalone boxed quotations headed “Education” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“The trouble with Catholics is that they like to have things proved; wherein they differ from a more advanced and enlightened world. Alone among modern people, they do not think that a thing being talked about is the same as its being proved.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness April 13, 1923, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)