Writing Quotes

"Do It Again"

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

― G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Joy Davidman: Quotes from The Commonplace Book

"Lacking belief in the promises and commandments of God, one must fall back on a "man-centred" philosophy-something called humanism or materialism, which accepts this life and its immediate desires as the basis of all conduct. But you can't get a moral law out of materialism. There is no logical reason why a materialist shouldn't poison his nagging wife, if he can get away with it.

"The essential amorality of all atheist doctrines is often hidden from us by an irrelevant personal argument. We see that many articulate secularists are well-meaning and law-abiding men; we see them go into righteous indignation over injustice and often devote their lives to good works. So we conclude that "he can't be wrong whose life is in the right"-that their philosophies are just as good guides to action as Christianity. What we don't see is that they are not acting on their philosophies. They are acting, out of habit or sentiment, on an inherited Christian ethic which they still take for granted though they have rejected the creed from which it sprang. Their children will inherit somewhat less of it."

--Joy Davidman, Smoke on the Mountain

John Updike: Quotes from The Commonplace Book

Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time? It is even possible to dislike our old selves, those disposable ancestors of ours. For instance, my high-school self — skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless high school — strikes me now as considerably obnoxious, though I owe him a lot: without his frantic ambition and insecurity I would not be sitting on (as my present home was named by others) Haven Hill.

--John Updike

Neil Gaiman: Quotes from The Commonplace Book

"All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories."
- NEIL GAIMAN

Lionel Shriver: Quotes from The Commonplace Book

“Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.”

― Lionel Shriver

Camille Paglia: Quotes from The Commonplace Book

Subversion requires limits to violate. --Camille Paglia

T. H. White: Quotes from The Commonplace Book

“We cannot build the future by avenging the past.”

― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

"Stifled by Heaps of Imitations"

“It is not wonderful, but yet it excites wonder, when, in contemplating a literature, [especially the German,] one observes how a whole nation cannot get free from a subject which has been given, and happily treated in a certain form, but will have it repeated in every manner, until, at last, the original itself is covered up, and stifled by the heaps of imitations.” – Goethe

Never Was Otherwise

“Martin knew nothing about America, or he would have known perfectly well that if its individual citizens, to a man, are to be believed, it always is depressed, and always is stagnated, and always is at an alarming crisis, and never was otherwise; though as a body, they are ready to make oath upon the Evangelists at any hour of the day or night, that it is the most thriving and prosperous of all countries on the habitable globe.”

― Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (1842)

Nor Is He Early

He comes precisely when he means to.

"I Should Thank God ... "

"...The same rising generation was lightly tossing about that pessimism which is only possible in the happy time of youth. They were criticising the General Thanksgiving in the Prayer-Book, and remarking that a good many people have very little reason to be thankful for their creation. And the old man, who was then so old that he hardly ever spoke at all, said suddenly out of his silence. "I should thank God for my creation if I knew I was a lost soul."

"When I had been for some time in these, the darkest depths of the contemporary pessimism, I had a strong inward impulse to revolt; to dislodge this incubus or throw off this nightmare. But as I was still thinking the thing out by myself, with little help from philosophy and no real help from religion, I invented a rudimentary and makeshift mystical theory of my own. It was substantially this; that even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting. Anything was magnificent as compared with nothing. Even if the very daylight were a dream, it was a day-dream; it was not a nightmare. The mere fact that one could wave one's arms and legs about (or those dubious external objects in the landscape which were called one's arms and legs) showed that it had not the mere paralysis of a nightmare. Or if it was a nightmare, it was an enjoyable nightmare. In fact, I had wandered to a position not very far from the phrase of my Puritan grandfather, when he said that he would thank God for his creation if he were a lost soul. I hung on to the remains of religion by one thin thread of thanks. I thanked whatever gods might be, not like Swinburne, because no life lived for ever, but because any life lived at all; not, like Henley for my unconquerable soul (for I have never been so optimistic about my own soul as all that) but for my own soul and my own body, even if they could be conquered. This way of looking at things, with a sort of mystical minimum of gratitude, was of course, to some extent assisted by those few of the fashionable writers who were not pessimists; especially by Walt Whitman, by Browning and by Stevenson; Browning's "God must be glad one loves his world so much", or Stevenson's "belief in the ultimate decency of things". But I do not think it is too much to say that I took it in a way of my own; even if it was a way I could not see clearly or make very clear. What I meant, whether or no I managed to say it, was this; that no man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy."

--from "The Autobiography," by G. K. Chesterton.

Debatable Points

A version of the poisoning the well fallacy that is extremely common today is the tactic of dismissing the arguments of an opponent on the grounds that they are allegedly motivated by “hatred.” You think Amoris Laetitia is problematic? You must be motivated by hatred of Pope Francis! You disapprove of homosexual behavior? You must be motivated by hatred of homosexuals! You favor border enforcement? You must be motivated by hatred of immigrants! And so on. Part of the problem here, of course, is that hatred is not necessarily the motive in any of these cases. But the reason that poisoning the well is fallacious is that, even if hatred were a person’s motivation, that would be completely irrelevant to whether his claims are true and his arguments cogent. Logically speaking, motives don’t matter. --Edward Feser
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2018/07/the-ad-hominem-fallacy-is-sin.html#more

What They Said

Keep It Together

"Now in a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the same idea at the back of the great American experiment; the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melting-pot must not melt. The original shape was traced on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it becomes shapeless." --G. K. Chesterton, "What I Saw In America"

The First Fountains of Life

"Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them, and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation. He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilization, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilization. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world." --G. K. Chesterton

Something Remained

"He had held to a rather lukewarm faith that something remained in him to be called forth, and that the voice that should call would be heard in its own time, if ever, and not through any seeking."

--Robert Hugh Benson, "None Other Gods".

One Of The Wisest Things I Ever Heard

You can't have everything. It would take up way too much space. --Kameron.

That's So Wong

Getting great at something, whatever it is, is not a means to an end; it is the end. Because then you'll have something they can't take from you, that pride in knowing that you didn't sell yourself short or bow to the crushing gravity of Mediocrity. You can wake up every day, look at Your Thing, and know that it's slightly better than it was yesterday, because you made it so. --David Wong

Loving the Toils of the Work

“A man must love a thing very much if he practices it without any hope of fame or money, but even practice it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.”

― G.K. Chesterton