“‘I disagree,’ John Keats once wrote in a letter, about the world as a ‘vale of tears... Call the world, if you please, “the vale of soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world.’”
Thomas Boswell, How Life Imitates The World Series
“to illuminate the human soul.”
The task of historians as well as novelists according to British historian Cicely Veronica Wedgewood (1911-97), quoted in Quotes, Notes and Anecdotes (The Write File Quarterly) Spring 1997 and there attributed to her obituary in The Economist March 28, 1997
“It is better to be defeated than to confess defeat in advance.”
William Jennings Bryan in a letter to his brother Charles in 1920, quoted in Robert W. Cherny, A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan
“But by the mid-twentieth century, God was killed off in the public mind – or if not killed, then badly disabled…”
William D. Gairdner The Trouble With Democracy
They describe rural New Hampshire churches in March 1968 with spires “pointing the way toward salvation and a God who was, by most current accounts, either dead or hiding out in Argentina. It was going to be a bad year.”
William W. Prochenau & Richard W. Larsen, A Certain Democrat: Senator Henry M. Jackson A Political Biography
“I can listen patiently to a Communist repeating for hours at a time that Property is unnecessary, because men must surrender selfish interests to social ideals. I only begin to break the furniture when somebody starts to prove that Property is necessary, because men are all selfish and every man must look after himself. The case for Property is not that a man must look after himself; but, on the contrary, that a normal man has to look after other people, if it be simply a wife and family. It is that this unit should have an economic basis for its social independence. If he were considering only himself, he might be more independent as a vagabond; he might be more secure as a serf. But the point at the moment is that I like Property because it is a noble thing. I can respect the revolutionist who dislikes it because it is an ignoble thing. But I have no truck with the cynic who likes it because it is ignoble.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The New Dark Ages” in G.K.’s Weekly May 21, 1927, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 # 8, Issue 73 (July-August 2006)
“Now that God is dead, however, or at least comatose”
Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic Monthly March 2004
“Perhaps the world is divided into those who laugh first and think afterwards, and those who think first and laugh afterwards.”
G.K. Chesterton in American Review September 1935, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008)