“The river of human nonsense flows on forever.”

G.K. Chesterton, “A Sermon on Inns,” in The Flying Inn, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #1 (September 2003)

Regarding a Bible Ukrainian Christians had secretly copied by hand under Communism, “Would similar risks have been taken and similar loving care have been expended on copying out, say, Magna Carta if for some reason it had become unobtainable? Or the American Declaration of Independence? Or the Communist Manifesto? Or Lady Chatterley’s Lover? Or The Thoughts of Chairman Mao? Or, descending to what Dr Johnson called unresisting imbecility – the recently acclaimed Helsinki Declaration?”

Malcolm Muggeridge in a 1976 speech in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge

“Men go abroad to wonder at the height of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering.”

St. Augustine, quoted on title page of John Stewart Collis Living With A Stranger: A Discourse on the Human Body.

“It is certainly one of the things that we can’t not know that no one may deliberately take innocent human life. The more particular doctrine of man as the created image of God seems unknown beyond the bible’s sphere of influence; it is not one of the things we can’t not know. Some intuition of the sacredness of human life is universal nonetheless…”

J. Budziszewski What We Can’t Not Know

“Awe-full life”

Recommended, especially in old age, by Paul Pearsall in The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need: Repress your anger, think negatively, be a good blamer, & throttle your inner child.

“Innocent Louis [XVI] bears the sins of many generations: he too experiences that man’s tribunal is not in this Earth; that if he had no Higher one, it were not well with him.”

Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution

“For there is only one happiness possible or conceivable under the sun, and that is enthusiasm – that strange and splendid word that has passed through so many vicissitudes, which meant, in the eighteenth century, the condition of a lunatic, and in ancient Greece, the presence of a god.”

GKC in an essay on Tolstoy quoted by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #6 [it was an essay Schall found in the library of the U of Virginia that he had never seen before].