“That is what makes life at once so splendid and so strange. We are in the wrong world. When I thought that was the right town, it bored me; when I knew it was wrong, I was happy. So the false optimism, the modern happiness, tires us because it tells us we fit into this world. The true happiness is that we don’t fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Ballad of a Strange Town” in Tremendous Trifles, quoted by Joseph Grabowski in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #11 (9-10/21)

“Karol Wojtyla who would later tell the French writer André Frossard that the most important world in the Gospels was ‘truth’…”

George Weigel Witness to Hope

On Jan. 12 I was on NewsTalk Sauga 960 to discuss my National Post column on the Pope’s remarks about the selfishness of choosing pets over kids, and the self-absorbed response of some commentators.

In my latest National Post column I lampoon self-centred objections to the Pope calling preferring pets to children selfish.

“he looked upon us as a sort of animals, to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use, than by its assistance, to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had not given us; that we …had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavours to supply them by our own inventions…”

The narrator’s account of his Houyhnhnm master’s judgement on humans, in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels

“For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live forever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, in Heaven’s Chancery itself…”

Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution

“I am not severe – I am sweet by nature. But I defend the rigidity principle. God is stronger than human weakness and deviations. God will always have the last word.”

Pope John Paul II, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen April 3, 2005

“If it is not right, do not do it. If it is not true, do not say it.”

Marcus Aurelius, quoted on Instagram by “dailystoic” September 15, 2021