“What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 No. 2 (Oct.-Nov. 2000)
“One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.”
Anthony Powell, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail June 5 2000
“Their art for art’s sake was a drunken variant of the stern age’s commerce for commerce’s sake, science for science’ sake.”
Garry Wills Chesterton (regarding the decadents of the 1880s and 1890s)
“usually to be found nailing his colors to the fence”.
Humphrey Carpenter regarding former Church of England Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie, quoted in National Review October 14, 1996
“If all things are always the same, it is because they are always heroic. If all things are always the same, it is because they are always new. To each man one soul only is given; to each soul only is given a little power – the power at some moments to outgrow and swallow up the stars. If age after age that power comes upon men, whatever gives it to them is great. Whatever makes men feel old is mean – an empire or a skin-flint shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great – a great war or a love story. And in the darkest of the books of God there is written a truth that is also a riddle. It is of the new things that men tire – of fashions and proposals and improvements and change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is the old things that are young. There is no sceptic who does not feel that many have doubted before. There is no rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his novelties are ancient. There is no worshipper of change who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of the weariness of the universe. But we who do the old things are fed by nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who is in love thinks that anyone has been in love before. No woman who has a child thinks that there have been such things as children. No people that fight for their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken empires.”
The spirit of Adam Wayne in G.K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“‘Whosoever is delighted in solitude,’ goes the old saying that Francis Bacon repeated, ‘is either a wild beast or a god.’ One does not actually have to be a god, but it is true that to enjoy being alone a person must build his own mental routines…”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow (he seems to give the beast option short shrift)
“Learn to pause, or nothing worthwhile can catch up to you.”
Unknown [widely cited, sometimes as a Zen koan, without further attribution]
“’I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done, as long as I enjoyed it at the time,’ she [Katharine Hepburn] once said. That really is not a sound thought, and not even worldly…. If he enjoyed the rape, he should feel no regret for having done it?”
William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review August 11, 2003