“Tell us, pray, what devil
This melancholy is, which can transform
Men into monsters.”

Source: Books, Coningsby (1844), Endymion (1880), Ch. 81. An anecdote is related of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper (1621–1683), who, in speaking of religion, said, "People differ in their discourse and profession about these matters, but men of sense are really but of one religion." To the inquiry of "What religion?" the Earl said, "Men of sense never tell it", reported in Burnet, History of my own Times, vol. i. p. 175, note (edition 1833).

Pope Francis quotes Bloy in his first homily as Pope. Pope Francis: 1st homily. Missa pro Ecclesiae in the Sistine Chapel http://www.news.va/en/news/pope-francis-1st-homily-full-text

Christmas under Hamas rule, BBC News, 22 December 2007 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7154134.stm, Quote from a statement made during his visit to Gaza City on possible implementation of Islamic fundamentalist internal policies like mandatory hijab and other measures

Source: The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), Ch. 29, Song, st. 1.

Beautiful Losers (1966)
Context: What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.

Canto 12, stanza 37
The Faerie Queene (1589–1596), Book V

Source: Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea (2014), Chapter 16, “Sentence” (p. 151)

28 Aug 92
The Days Are Just Packed
Source: The Essential Calvin and Hobbes: A Calvin and Hobbes Treasury