“The clouds above us join and separate,/ The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns./ Life is like that, so why not relax?/ Who can stop us from celebrating?”
The poet Lu Yu, cited in Benjamin Hoff The Tao of Pooh
“They talk a great deal about education, because it is compulsory education. Whether or no they can educate, they are always eager to compel. But as a fact their aim is the very contrary of education. It is the destruction of education, and even of experience. It is to make men forget the past, forget the facts, forget the very memories of their own lives. And if their compulsory culture spreads successfully, it is very likely that we shall be alone in knowing what was known to every man, woman and child, in the hour of our danger and deliverance.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness Sept. 24, 1920, quoted in standalone boxed quotations headed “Education” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“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