Chisholm, G. B. Cited in Overstreet, H. A. (1959). The mature mind. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Serendipity plays a major role in life, and certainly on the web. As anyone who has spent considerable time in a library will tell you, often, the most interesting things you learn are things you find along the way to finding what you were looking for.

While looking for one quote to use as a summary of my web page philosophy, I found another. Indeed, it was the wrong book, which I'd picked it up for sentimental reasons. The following is what I found in the first paragraph of the book.

When this book was first undertaken, I had the good fortune to come across a sentence that seemed to me to go straight to the center of our human concerns. I was by Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, Canadian psychiatrist, later the distinguished head of the World Federation for Mental Health. The sentence read: So far in the history of the world there have never been enough mature people in the right places. That seemed to me to sum up in starkly simple words what been at fault in the human situation. Because it said what I felt needed saying, I gratefully appropriated it for the book.

The original was written in 1949. It leaves me wondering just how many treasures there are out there in paper, just waiting to go digital.

York, Ontario
Canada
April 15, 1996