“In 100 years, we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college.”

Joe Sobran quoted “In the last issue of Gilbert” by David Deavel, according to Pamela Patnode “The Art of Language” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023); she added “The observation rings true today, and it has scriptural significance.”

“Ideas and values, not location or weather, were what distinguished the Greeks.”

Victor Davis Hanson The Wars of the Ancient Greeks

“the type of modern idealism is a very narrow type. As Stevenson said, modern civilisation is ‘a dingy, ungentlemanly business. It leaves so much out of a man.’ In the old romances it was the villain that was monotonous. In the old melodramas it was the villain who always looked the same. His black moustache, eyeglass, and cigarette, were a sort of uniform of the infernal service. But the good men were of all conceivable shapes and colours – and some rather inconceivable. Don Quixote was a good man, and starved himself; Mr. Pickwick was a good man, and did not object to milk punch; Sam Weller was a good man, and did not object to pretty housemaids; the Master of Ravenswood was a good man and got drowned; Sidney Carton was a good man and got drunk; Benedick is a good man in Much Ado About Nothing; and so is the Friar in Romeo and Juliet. The old masters maintain the gayest miscellaneousness in good men by having one black stick to represent bad men. It was like the patches that their ladies put upon their complexions. That one black spot threw up and set free all the changing colours and contours of real health. But to-day we are drifting to the opposite extreme. We are getting only one kind of good man – one who approves of international peace, one who is quite in favour of social reform, one who thinks there should be a minimum wage, but also a court of arbitration – enough, you know him. And we have got around us, on the other hand, every antic and extravagance of the evil man; varieties which none of the old romancers could have conceived, or would have been permitted to describe. I confess I prefer the old-time notice-boards warning men off particular precipices and swamps in what is in other respects a rolling and romantic land of liberty.”

G.K. Chesterton in The Eye Witness March 7, 1912 reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)

“Think enough and you won’t know anything.”

Kenneth Patchen, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go

“It looked at Ransom in silence and at last began to smile. We have all often spoken – Ransom himself had often spoken – of a devilish smile. Now he realized that he had never taken the words seriously. The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; It was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with a horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice as the Lady was beyond virtue.”

C.S. Lewis Perelandra [it being a devil who has possessed the body of the late scientist Edward Rolles Weston]

“What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry – but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own sceptical mind, is a doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, so long as he wrote Good Poetry.”

G.K. Chesterton in “About Poetry” in As I Was Saying quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)

“Asses would rather have refuse than gold.”

Heraclitus, quoted by an author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine November 1992

“We often hear, ‘Life is short… better enjoy it’! How about, ‘Eternity is long, better prepare for it’!”

Emailed by a friend without attribution April 29, 2024.