“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied."
John Stuart Mill, quoted as "Thought du jour" in Globe & Mail February 15, 2002
“I prefer to regard the sun merely in the light of a strange star that has startled me by visiting my garden in the middle of summer.”
G.K. Chesterton in “On the Solar System” in All I Survey, quoted by James V. Schall S.J. in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 16 # 1-2 (September-October 2012)
“we might say, like the Frenchman asked if he had lunched on the boat, ‘au contraire.’”
G.K. Chesterton, “Reflections on Thursday” (looking back at writing The Man Who Was Thursday) reprinted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #8 (July-August, 2007)
“Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.”
C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy
In my latest Convivium article I say the people playing at holding a Black Mass in Ottawa weren’t serious… which is.
“‘When the devil makes his offer (always open incidentally) of the kingdoms of the earth, it is the bordellos which glow so alluringly to most of us, not the banks and the counting-houses and the snow-swept corridors of power… Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society - in the beginning was the Flesh, and the Flesh became Word; with its own mysteries - this is my birth pill; swallow it in remembrance of me! - and its own sacred texts and scriptures - the erotica which fall like black atomic rain on the just and unjust alike, drenching us, stupefying us. To be carnally minded is life!’”
Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered
“Water is bewitched, so that it always goes downhill. Birds are bewitched, so that they fly. The sun is bewitched so that it shines.”
G.K. Chesterton, “A Fairy Tale,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
In the winter forest “There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness – a laughter that was as mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life.”
Jack London White Fang