|
1ea59e8
|
To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
|
|
faith
hope
love
inspirational
forgiveness
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
7366e43
|
It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.
|
|
femininism
lies
inspirational
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
f38b548
|
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
|
|
inspirational
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
bc21a20
|
The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
8f1bb0d
|
Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
1db1e4a
|
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
0ef3d55
|
Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
6d14f88
|
I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.
|
|
life
characters
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
2e34f38
|
The man who kills a man kills a man. The man who kills himself kills all men. As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
|
|
suicide
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
8ab299b
|
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
|
|
politics
religion
tradition
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
112e5c7
|
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
|
|
war
song
irish
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
3aad18f
|
The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.
|
|
nature
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
f824f59
|
Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
f4c2bdf
|
But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. . . . As a politician, he wil..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
cd7c4f3
|
My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
|
|
wit
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
2e1db44
|
There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
b1e10e0
|
According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.
|
|
religion
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
76ce296
|
The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.
|
|
criticism
critic
detectives
mystery
crime
creativity
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
a559b01
|
Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
6f5079f
|
Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
ec7455e
|
Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.
|
|
nativity
christmas
jesus-christ
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
ea2cbd8
|
Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
|
|
fairy-tales
inspirational
bogeyman
dragons
dragon
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
a059427
|
Lying in bed would be an altogether supreme experience if one only had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
77954c7
|
Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
7c26e84
|
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.
|
|
resolutions
soul
starting-over
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
5df2350
|
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
|
|
inspirational
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
e2aab8e
|
The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
452d293
|
Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine gu..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
362bd33
|
It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
89d723e
|
Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined."
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
40520f9
|
Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
|
|
philosophy-of-life
theology
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
966a333
|
Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
|
|
wealth
greed
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
bfcdbbd
|
Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.
|
|
personal-autonomy
responsibilities
laws
rules
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
79c5195
|
Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
be82771
|
We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
|
|
inspirational
reminding
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
67f3580
|
The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
1fb3c02
|
A Second Childhood." When all my days are ending And I have no song to sing, I think that I shall not be too old To stare at everything; As I stared once at a nursery door Or a tall tree and a swing. Wherein God's ponderous mercy hangs On all my sins and me, Because He does not take away The terror from the tree And stones still shine along the road That are and cannot be. Men grow too old for love, my love, Men grow too old for wine, But I..
|
|
joy
wonder
death
life
love
old
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
eda9ca8
|
Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.
|
|
violence
strength
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
629b57d
|
There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
099d428
|
And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He s..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
7adb745
|
Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless. We might almost say that in a society without such good things we should hardly have any t..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
2929b2e
|
If you'd take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can't say. But it might.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
f2986d3
|
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
|
|
poets
logic-reason
insanity
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
ba0312e
|
vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture."
|
|
poetry
funny
free-verse
free-verse-poetry
funny-but-true
|
G.K. Chesterton |