“It is easy to maintain a situation while it is still secure;/ It is easy to deal with a situation before symptoms develop;/ It is easy to break a thing when it is yet brittle;/ It is easy to dissolve a thing when it is yet minute.”
Lao Tzu II.LXIV.152
“Vanitas vanitatum, which of us has his wish in this world, or, having it, is satisfied?”
G.K. Chesterton “Introduction to Thackeray”, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“Literature is only the contrast between the weird curves of Nature and the straightness of the soul.”
G.K. Chesterton, in header quotation without further attribution in “Giving Cheese Its Due” by Jason West in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)
“If my circumstances have made me wholly stupid, how can I be certain even that I am right in altering those circumstances?”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News December 1, 1906, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
“Thanatos can assume any form it wishes; it can kill eros, the life drive, and then simulate it. Once thanatos does this to you, you are in big trouble; you suppose you are driven by eros but it is thanatos wearing a mask.”
Philip K. Dick VALIS
“If there are ghastly things to be faced the only thing we can do is make it glorious to face them.”
GKC in New Witness May 17, 1918 quoted in Gilbert magazine Vol. 9 #2 (Oct.-Dec. 2005)
“We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Oct. 21, 1905, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“In the name of commonsense let it be remembered that Shakespeare lived before the time when unsuccessful poets thought it poetical to be decadent and unsuccessful soldiers thought it military to be silent. Men like Sidney and Raleigh and Essex could have fought as well as Macbeth and could have ranted as well as Macbeth. Why should Shakespeare shrink from making a great general talk poetry when half the great generals of his time actually wrote great poetry?”
“The Macbeths,” in G.K. Chesterton Brave New Family