“We are as Hector on the walls of Troy with Andromache and always have been. Only the Crystal Palace and all those nineteenth-century trust funds ever assured us otherwise.”
An author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine October 1991
“It is a good thing to suffer fools gladly; and an even better thing to enjoy fools uproariously.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News October 9, 1920, quoted in “Chesterton Rewrites more of the Classic Lines” in Gilbert Magazine July-August 2007
“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