“I try to enthuse my patients with the glory of the world, with indifferent success, I must admit. It is almost as if they wanted the world to be boring, to justify their own lack of interest in it. To be bored and disabused is taken by many people nowadays as a sign of spiritual election or superiority, as if the world does not quite come up to their exacting standards.”
Theodore Dalrymple in National Post December 27, 2003
“The function of imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange; not so much to make wonders facts as to make facts wonders.”
G.K. Chesterton “A Defence of China Shepherdesses” in The Defendant quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (11/12/2021)
“If we live, we live; if we die, we die; if we suffer, we suffer; if we are terrified, we are terrified. There is no problem about it.”
Alan Watts quoted in Jon Winokur Zen To Go
“Blasphemy depends upon belief, and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Introductory Remarks” in Heretics quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 17 #5 (March-April 2014)
“All this shows how much luck there is in human affairs, and how little we should worry about anything except doing our best.”
Winston Churchill The Hinge of Fate [with respect to Parliament not turning on him in the dark period]
“there it stretched away into the grey haze of London, really beautiful, this vast hive of men and women who had learned at least the primary lesson of the gospel, that there was no God but man, no priest, but the politician, no prophet, but the schoolmaster.”
The internal monologue of politician Oliver Brand in Robert Hugh Benson Lord of the World
“The most essential educational product is Imagination…. The child who can see the pictures in the fire will need less to see the pictures on the film…. So long as the minds of the poor were perpetually stirred and enlivened by ghost-stories, fairy-stories and legends of wild and wonderful things, they remained comparatively contented; possibly too contented, but still contented. The moment modern science and instruction stopped all these things, we had a Labour Question and the huge discontent of today… dull people always want excitement.”
“The True Victorian Hypocrisy,” in G.K. Chesterton Brave New Family
“We meet here [the grave of her brother, who died of croup at two and a half, two years before she was born]. It is a place where there is but a thin veil between the past, the present, and the future. It is a thin place, a sacred space for the two of us. The phrase ‘thin places’ comes to us from legends of pre-Christian Ireland…. Heaven and Earth, the Celtic saying goes, are only three feet apart; but in a thin place that distance is even shorter. It’s a place where we can sense the Divine more readily. Or perhaps it refers to a place where one can travel back and forth between two worlds: this one and the eternal world. Stonehenge comes to mind. As does Mount Sinai… We encounter God in the thin places, which become sacred spaces when we sanctify the ephemeral with monuments and alters…. There are man-made thin spaces. Cathedrals that soar… Or the small house of worship that cried out to Saint Francis of Assisi to be repaired. There is music that breaks the barrier… We have all had those moments when we felt touched… [her elision] by something.”
Diane Weber Bederman in Convivium 10-11/13