Posts in Famous quotes
Words Worth Noting - November 6, 2024

“Of course, it would be worth while to pay a big price to get a well-informed people. At the present moment we are paying an abominably big price to get a more and more ill-informed people.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly, as header quotation on Dale Ahlquist “Chesterton University” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)

Words Worth Noting - November 4, 2024

“the most important trait of survivors is a ‘nonselfconscious individualism,’ or a strongly directed purpose that is not self-seeking. People who have that quality are bent on doing their best in all circumstances, yet they are not concerned primarily with advancing their own interests…. Narcissistic individuals, who are mainly concerned with protecting their self, fall apart when the external conditions turn threatening. The ensuing panic prevents them from doing what they must do; their attention turns inward in an effort to restore order in consciousness, and not enough remains to negotiate outside reality.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience [summarizing the ideas of Richard Logan].

Famous quotes, LifeJohn Robson
Words Worth Noting - November 3, 2024

“The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is – what it was intended to do, and how it is meant to be used. After that has been discovered, the temperance reformer may decide that the corkscrew was made for a bad purpose, and the communist may think the same about the cathedral. But such questions come later. The first thing to understand first thing is to understand the object before you: as long as you think the corkscrew is meant for opening tins or the cathedral for entertaining tourists you can say nothing to the purpose about them. The first thing the reader needs to know about Paradise Lost is what Milton meant it to be.”

The opening paragraph of A Preface to Paradise Lost by C.S. Lewis, quoted in Harry Lee Poe, The Making of C.S. Lewis [and how relevant to reactions by proudly atheist French politicians when Notre Dame de Paris caught fire].

Words Worth Noting - November 2, 2024

“Scholars have spread much darkness” “soon we shall know nothing at all”

Mark Twain, quoted by Nicholas Davidson in Chronicles magazine September 1988 [and it can be found elsewhere online but nobody seems to know what connected the two halves and no one offers a more detailed source; so if he did not say it, and maybe he did not, he missed a good chance].

Words Worth Noting - November 1, 2024

“Literature is not supposed to be God Almighty summing up at the end of the world. It is supposed to be somebody telling a story about somebody else.”

G.K. Chesterton “Report of a speech, Glasgow Herald, Feb. 7, 1910”, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)

Words Worth Noting - October 31, 2024

“Assassination, said Disraeli, never changed the history of the world.”

An article in The Economist May 25, 1991 [it added that while it might be true, that of Rajiv Gandhi might prove an exception, which was a remarkable example of present-fixated narrow-mindedness since that of Lincoln and of Julius Caesar arguably did whereas his certainly did not].