“All that can be said is that when man doesn’t make trouble for himself, nature makes it for him.”
Link Byfield in The Report Jan. 3, 2000 [on the general subject of it not being possible to predict what trouble would next come along].
“The opinions which nobody can agree with are mostly in the books that nobody can read.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution as header quotation on the book review section of Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)
“Do you really want a safe place? Is that what you want? You want to be so weak that you want to be protected from threat. What the hell kind of life is that? You’re a paralyzed rabbit in a hole. That’s no life for a human being. You should be confronting danger and the unknown and malevolence. And the reason for that, too, is – this is the weird paradox – and I believe this is the paradox, first of all, that was discovered in part by Buddha but also laid forth very clearly in Christianity, which is that: The solution to the problem of tragedy and malevolence is the willingness to face them.”
Jordan Peterson on Instagram (audio and CC which I transcribed) Sept. 24, 2022 [https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ci5ZIf1pm5s/?igshid=YWZlMWU5YjI%3D].
“‘I used to keep myself busy, the way working people do, so that I would not be alone.’... ‘Is it true that you purposely seek chaos in order to forget the painful questions [of existence]?’ ‘Yes, that’s right. When I reach a big city, I can’t despair over any answers to life’s big problems. I need to be fearless and resourceful. When I’m broke and hungry and night is falling fast I must find my way to safety.’”
A homeless person interviewing himself in Harper’s magazine September 2001
“BY ONE OF THOSE QUEER [a word that used to mean “strange”] associations that nobody can ever understand, a large number of people have come to think that frivolity has some kind of connection with enjoyment. As a matter of fact, nobody can really enjoy himself unless he is serious.... Men can only enjoy fundamental things. In order to enjoy the lightest and most flying joke a man must be rooted in some basic sense of the good of things; and the good of things means, of course, the seriousness of things…. The really frivolous man, the frivolous man of society, we all know, and any of us who know him truthfully know that if he has one characteristic more salient than another it is that he is a pessimist.... Religion might approximately be defined as the power which makes us joyful about the things that matter. Fashionable frivolity might, with a parallel propriety, be defined as the power which makes us sad about the things that do not matter.”
G.K. Chesterton “The Frivolous Man” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 3-4/22
“We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press.”
G.K. Chesterton (not further attributed) header quotation on “News With Views Compiled by Mark Pilon” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“To endure what is unendurable is true endurance.”
“Japanese proverb” quoted in Patrick Hughes and George Brecht, Vicious Circles and Infinity: An Anthology of Paradoxes.
“Sometimes our stomachs hurt because we would go up to 15 days without eating. There were times when we only had one bird to share among the three of us.… We never lost hope because there’s a God Almighty and I have a lot of faith in Him. I knew He was going to help us.”
A guy who went on a three-week fishing trip from his home in Mexico with two friends that turned into a nine-month, 8,000 kilometre ordeal that ended in the North Pacific, living on raw seagulls, raw fish and rainwater, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen August 17, 2006.