“‘If a man will not work he shall not eat,’ wrote St. Paul to the Thessalonians.”
Margaret Thatcher to Church of Scotland, quoted in James V. Schall Religion, Wealth and Poverty
“Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.”
Robert Louis Stevenson quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“The man who said, ‘Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed,’ put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth is, ‘Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised.’”
G.K. Chesterton discussing George Bernard Shaw in Heretics, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 #1 (Sept. 2001)
“If belief in such [religious] truth declines in general, then that species of art can never flourish again which—like the Divine Comedy, the paintings of Raphael, the frescoes of Michelangelo, the Gothic cathedrals—presupposes not only a cosmic but a metaphysical significance in the objects of art. A moving tale will one day be told how there once existed such an art, such an artist’s faith.’”
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Human, All Too Human,” quoted by Edward T. Oakes in First Things March 2001
“Attempts must be made to modify the institutions (legal, political, social, economic) with the objective of matching these more closely with the empirical realities of man’s moral limitations.”
James Buchanan What Should Economists Do?
“After my warning order to the company that we would be moving off in a couple of hours I said that I was going to the communion service first. I set off by myself. Half-way there, I looked back to see if anyone else was coming and found to my surprise that virtually the whole company was following me in single file.”
My high school English teacher Stewart Bull, then a major and company commander with the Essex Scottish in Normandy in July 1944 (from his unpublished memoir Happy Warrior: Adventures in the Classroom).
“‘The best lack all conviction...’ something like that. ‘What rough beast... slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.’ A creature with bad posture, nightmare of the world.”
Philip K. Dick The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
“in a world without God, there is not room enough for a man.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Joyce Little in an interview in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 #7 (June 1999)