“The first fact about the celebration of a birthday is that it is a way of affirming defiantly, and even flamboyantly, that it is a good thing to be alive.”
G.K. Chesterton as a standalone quotation in illustration, without further attribution, in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“Since life passes, whether sweet or bitter,/ Since the soul must pass the lips. Whether in Nishpur or in Balkh,/ Drink wine, for after you and I are gone many a moon/ Will pass from old to new, from new to old.”
Omar Khayyam, cited in Sadegh Hedayat’s deeply disturbed novel The Blind Owl
“No Catholic thinks he is a good Catholic; or he would by that thought become a bad Catholic. I for one am not even tempted to any illusion in that matter; I fear that very often, when I have got up early to go to Mass, I have said with a groan, Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum, which, I may explain to the Moslem, is not a quotation from the Mass. But the critic here in question does not say, in the grand Lucretian manner, ‘Religion alone can persuade men to such evils.’”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly August 24, 1933, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2022)
“To attempt to be religious without practicing a specific religion is as possible as attempting to speak without a specific language.”
George Santayana, as the header quotation on Chapter 64 in George Jonas Beethoven’s Mask
“always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?”
Gabriel Syme in G.K. Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday
“History is still in the hands of individuals, who by their actions perform God’s miracles.”
James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg The Great Reckoning
In my latest Mercatornet column I say the United States Supreme Court is contributing to the corrosive distrust spreading in their society, and ours as well.
“Laugh while you can still breathe.”
Another of mine, from March 2, 1989.