“Paradox is the only basket large enough to hold truth…”
Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb
“Simplicity is the most difficult thing to secure in this world; it is the last limit of experience and the last effort of genius.”
George Sand, quoted on https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/george_sand_390195
“Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.”
G. K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“The pain in my soul is unbearable. I keep asking myself the same unsolvable question: If my assault rifle took people’s lives, it means that I, Mikhail Kalashnikov, ... son of a farmer and Orthodox Christian am responsible for people’s deaths. The longer I live, the more often that question gets into my brain, the deeper I go in my thoughts and guesses about why the Almighty allowed humans to have devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression. Everything changes, only a man and his thinking remain unchanged: he’s just as greedy, evil, heartless and restless as before!”
Mikhail Kalashnikov, the designer of the AK-47 assault rifle in “a regretful letter” to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, shortly before his death at age 94, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen Jan. 14, 2014 (apparently a spokesman for the Patriarch replied “If the weapon is used to defend the Motherland, the Church supports both its creators and the servicemen using it.”)
“Fun and happiness are not synonymous. Happy people don’t need fun. Fun takes your mind off things.”
P.J. O’Rourke The Bachelor Home Companion
“At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise or wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by David W. Fagerberg in First Things March 2000
“One can’t always be magnificent, but simplicity is always a possible alternative.”
The narrator re his humble lifestyle as a playwright (before the adventure begins) in H.G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon
“The fact that… we still live well cannot ease the pain of feeling that we no longer live nobly.”
John Updike, quoted by ordained minister Kevin Little of Ottawa in an Op Ed in Ottawa Citizen June 13, 2002