“The sincere controversialist is above all things a good listener.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in an editorial in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008).
“Pascal’s favourite philosopher, St. Augustine, put it this way in the most famous Christian line outside Scripture: ‘Thou hast made us for Thyself, and (therefore) our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee’ (Confessions I, i, 2). A shark cannot stop swimming and hunting and eating. It is a perpetual motion machine. If its proper food is not available, it will eat anything, even empty metal containers. St. Thomas says: ‘Man cannot live without joy. That is why it is necessary that a man deprived of spiritual joys goes over into carnal pleasures.’”
Peter Kreeft Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined & Explained
“You’re never too old to become younger.”
Mae West, quoted on www.goodreads.com
“The progressive person comes by, saying gaily, ‘Why confine your soaring soul within the mere formularies of currants, suet, and eggs? Take anything, anything that this varied Cosmos has evolved. Every brick in the street is a potential pudding. Poisons are but a blundering search after pudding. Make your universal Christmas pudding out of materials as universal as the spirit of Christmas. Make it of glue, soot, potato peelings, blacking, hog’s-wash, rags, bones, rubbish, Spiritual Healers, Hygienic Marriages, Eastern Pessimism, flying teacups, Prussian Atheists, and Nut Sausages – and your Christmas pudding will be Larger, Broader, and more Mystic.’ To which I reply, ‘All right, so long as it tastes like Christmas pudding.’ But it doesn’t.”
G.K. Chesterton “A Progressive Yule to You, Too” from Illustrated London News Jan. 1, 1910, reprinted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #3 (Dec. 2006)
“At Christmas I see myself as I really am. And as I could be, if I weren’t such a stinker. As the whole sick, weary, unhappy world sees itself as it might be, if it weren’t such a stinker. Noel! Joy! Peace awaits. Killings, brutality, meanness is here. Cry world.”
Frank Capra The Name Above the Title
“G.K. Chesterton said he found it hard to believe in God, but harder to believe that a swamp, if left alone long enough, will eventually build Chartres Cathedral…”
Robert Fulford in National Post Dec. 16, 2006
"real eating will restore his sense of the festivity of being. Food does not exist merely for the sake of its nutritional value. To see it so is only to knuckle under still further to the desubstantialization of man, to regard not what things are, but what they mean to us… A man’s daily meal ought to be an exultation over the smack of desirability which lies at the roots of creation.”
Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb
“Who is the most read historian of the ancient world? the learned professor asks his class. Tacitus perhaps? Suetonius? Herodotus? All wrong, he’s afraid. The most read and probably most reliable recorder of ancient history was a man known as Luke, the probable author of the Third Gospel of the New Testament and its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles.”
Christian History Project, The Veil is Torn