|
284e8a8
|
There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they w..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
efd9cb5
|
There are, I believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy. It is quite enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep some thirty years ago over the day's newspaper and woke up last week over the later newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same people. In one paper he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. In th..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
74179af
|
The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the eart..
|
|
materialism
mysticism
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
551f246
|
We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
72b4c3f
|
There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
211ec85
|
When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, 'This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.' You say your civilisation will include all talents. Will it? Do you really m..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
a345f3a
|
Now I have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones. On the day that any copybook maxim is carried out there will be something like an earthquake on the earth. There is only one thing new that can be done under the sun; and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a blue day in June, ..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
64a13fd
|
The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents.
|
|
family
education
parenting
parents
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
5ecdc1d
|
In the lower classes the school master does not work for the parent, but against the parent. Modern education meanshanding down the customs of the minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority.
|
|
schooling
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
7ee2a8e
|
To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
7df19ea
|
Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
949494c
|
The priest looked puzzled also, as if at his own thoughts; he sat with knotted brow and then said abruptly: 'You see, it's so easy to be misunderstood. All men matter. You matter. I matter. It's the hardest thing in theology to believe.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
7ff0482
|
Oh, what's the good of talking about men?" cried Mary impatiently; "why, one might as well be a lady novelist or some horrid thing. There aren't any men. There are no such people. There's a man; and whoever he is he's quite different."
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
313a7a6
|
Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left-- sanity.
|
|
sanity
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
723801d
|
His soul swayed in a vertigo of moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made to a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as the square beneath him. He had, on the other other hand, only to keep his antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber. Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfort..
|
|
common-sense
honor
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
019eede
|
A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes," remarked Crook, with some impatience; "and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it."
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
45175f9
|
If ever I murdered somebody," he added quite simply, "I dare say it might be an Optimist."
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
4339995
|
The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
7f0555b
|
If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing, keep behind him.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
2002f4c
|
Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
eec51ac
|
The fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," over the gates of the lower world. The emancipated poets of to-day have written it over the gates of this world. But if we are to understand the story which follows, we must erase that apocalyptic writing, if only for an hour. We must recreate the faith of our fathers, if only as an artistic atmosphere. If, then, you are a pessimist, in reading this story, fore..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
cfbd7d1
|
For the world of science and evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
4cee174
|
It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers.
|
|
witch-hunts
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
d6e2c1f
|
The truth is people who worship health cannot remain healthy on the point.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
5a5f00b
|
all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
953499c
|
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do... Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine... He was damned by John Calvin... Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
b79ba96
|
No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he's realised exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about 'criminals,' as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he's got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he's squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is some..
|
|
introspection
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
20ad0ea
|
The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
d30a51a
|
The Saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
e1ccd09
|
The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: that people do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it may or may not be right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivably be right to kill a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man.
|
|
murder
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
f445154
|
The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world.
|
|
optimism
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
67c358d
|
There was one special thing you promised me at the beginning of the affair, and which you have certainly given me by the end of it.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
b54023b
|
Cooking is an art; it has in it personality, and even perversity, for the definition of an art is that which must be personal and may be perverse.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
6b2250a
|
To begin with, we must protest against a habit of quoting and paraphrasing at the same time. When a man is discussing what Jesus meant, let him state first of all what He said, not what the man thinks He would have said if he had expressed Himself more clearly.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
8293e3b
|
Now here comes in the whole collapse and huge blunder of our age. We have mixed up two different things, two opposite things. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. Progress does mean (just now) that we are always changing the vision. It should mean that we are slow but sure in bringing justice and mercy among men: it does mean that we are very swift in doubting the desirability of justice and mercy: ..
|
|
progress
morality
relativism
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
51e9c49
|
And pray where in earth or heaven are there prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
03564f2
|
And it did certainly appear that the prophets had put the people (engaged in the old game of Cheat the Prophet) in a quite unprecedented difficulty. It seemed really hard to do anything without fulfilling some of their prophecies. But there was, nevertheless, in the eyes of labourers in the streets, of peasants in the fields, of sailors and children, and especially women, a strange look that kept the wise men in a perfect fever of doubt. Th..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
41205fb
|
The way to build a church is not to pay for it, certainly not with somebody else's money. The way to build a church is not even to pay for it with your own money. The way to build a church is to build it.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
1d08f32
|
I hold it clear, therefore, if anything is clear about the business, that the Eugenists do not merely mean that the mass of common men should settle each other's marriages between them; the question remains, therefore, whom they do instinctively trust when they say that this or that ought to be done. What is this flying and evanescent authority that vanishes wherever we seek to fix it? Who is the man who is the lost subject that governs the..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
b264c1c
|
It is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men's marriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize and segregate anyone he likes. But it is not anarchy to say that a few great hygienists might enclose or limit the life of all citizens,
|
|
eugenics
tyranny
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
567fa64
|
Nothing, again, could be more prosaic and impenetrable than the domestic energies of Miss Diana Duke. But Innocent had somehow blundered on the discovery that her thrifty dressmaking went with a considerable feminine care for dress--the one feminine thing that had never failed her solitary self-respect. In consequence Smith pestered her with a theory (which he really seemed to take seriously) that ladies might combine economy with magnifice..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
b1a3fb6
|
Eugenics, as discussed, evidently means the control of some men
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
2c994c4
|
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
d243a12
|
I have known some people of very modern views driven by their distress to the use of theological terms to which they attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed tight and they could not pull it out.
|
|
swearing
|
G.K. Chesterton |