“We cannot describe mind in terms of matter; if only for the reason that we cannot even perceive matter except by mind.”
G.K. Chesterton “The Route of Reason” in Where Are The Dead? quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 (March-April 2022)
“it is perfectly permissible and perfectly natural to become bored with a subject just as it is perfectly permissible and perfectly natural to be thrown from a horse or to miss a trail or to look up the answer to a puzzle at the end of the book.”
GKC, “A Defence of Bores,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“This negligence [by people who simply don’t give religion much thought] in a matter where they themselves, their eternity, their all are at stake, fills me more with irritation than pity; it astounds and appalls me; it seems quite monstrous to me…. One needs no great sublimity of soul to realize that in this life there is no true and solid satisfaction, that all our pleasures are mere vanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and finally that death which threatens us at every moment must in a few years infallibly face us with the inescapable and appalling alternative of being annihilated or wretched throughout eternity.”
Peter Kreeft Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined & Explained
“As modern words are actually used, there is hardly a shade of difference left between meaning well and meaning nothing.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly October 25, 1934, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 1922 [and if you’re thinking wow, someone who could describe current conditions so exactly nearly a hundred years ago must have understood the underlying processes at work very well, I couldn’t agree more].
“there is no such thing in the world as a dull subject.”
G.K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Bores,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
In my latest Mercatornet column I ask what history has to say about the possibility of the United States breaking apart, and find the answer troubling.
“An heir finds the deeds to his house. Will he say, perhaps, that they are false, and not bother to examine them?”
Peter Kreeft Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined & Explained
“My own conclusion, after interviewing him at length one spring afternoon back in 1967, was that while [then-Social Credit leader R.N.] Thompson might not be anti-Semitic, he certainly was anti-semantic.”
Peter C. Newman in Maclean’s April 1, 1996