“There is no better proof of human vanity than to consider the causes and effects of love, because the whole universe can be changed by it. Cleopatra’s nose.”
Pascal Pensées
“What is the real corrective to the condition in which shocking things do not shock the earnest and ethical people who do them? And how can we make it clear to those who are so inconsistent as not to be wicked men that they are very consistently doing wicked things?”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 28, 1917, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
“the devil is a saint without humility. He is as austere as any anchorite; he is as intellectual as any doctor or theologian; he is as refined as any lady abbess; he is as sexless as any virgin martyr. The one difference between him and them is that he is an egoist; an austere, refined, intellectual, virgin egoist.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Feb. 3, 1906 quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 (March-April 2022)
“Wisdom is a virtue, not a talent, and so it is not the same as mere intelligence.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]
“Recall the recipe for unicorn stew: first, get a unicorn.”
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things #146 October 2004 [ridiculing Robert Reich’s formula for liberal electoral victory in the U.S.]
“We have been accused of hostility to the scientist, when we are merely hostile to the materialist.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 9, 1931, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022
“men dying in agonies to find a place [the North Pole] where no man can live – a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the meeting-place of some lines that do not exist.”
G.K. Chesterton in Heretics, quoted by Mary DeMarco in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #1 (September 2000) [about how we laugh at men who died looking for Christ’s tomb but celebrate those who died looking for the North Pole].
“The fact that I suppress what I know and pretend not to know it, even though I do know it, does not keep my buried knowledge from influencing my actions – but, since I suppress it, it distorts my thinking and influences my actions in a perverse way.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn