“There is only one intelligent reason why a man does not believe in miracles and that is that he does believe in materialism.”
G.K. Chesterton “Miracles and Death” in St. Francis of Assisi, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4.
“As for Martin, he was firmly persuaded that a man is badly off wherever he is, so he suffered in patience.”
Voltaire Candide
“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