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0d806f9
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We have to touch such men, not with a bargepole, but with a benediction," he said. "We have to say the word that will save them from hell. We alone are left to deliver them from despair when your human charity deserts them. Go on your own primrose path pardoning all your favourite vices and being generous to your fashionable crimes; and leave us in the darkness, vampires of the night, to console those who really need consolation; who do thi..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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bae925b
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Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while he is talking.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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c278f3d
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In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was quite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in crowds down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high post in the State.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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3ac4ce8
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Whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as an epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England.
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wisdom
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G.K. Chesterton |
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34cf07b
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But it's my reading of human nature that a man will cheat in his trade, but not in his hobby.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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1462eee
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Bad government, like good government, is a spiritual thing. Even the tyrant never rules by force alone; but mostly by fairy tales. And so it is with the modern tyrant,
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G.K. Chesterton |
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67dfc73
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Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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884a81f
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We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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e2b3988
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All roads lead to Rome; which is one reason why many people never get there.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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99e5e8f
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But there is a way of despising the dandelion which is not that of the dreary pessimist, but of the more offensive optimist. It can be done in various ways; one of which is saying, "You can get much better dandelions at Selfridge's," or "You can get much cheaper dandelions at Woolworth's." Another way is to observe with a casual drawl, "Of course nobody but Gamboli in Vienna really understands dandelions," or saying that nobody would put up..
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optimism
happiness
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G.K. Chesterton |
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804b868
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Unfortunately he was one of those who always tend to take their own fancies seriously; and in whose otherwise legitimate extravagance there is too little of the juice of the jest.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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fd5cefa
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Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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da93ec0
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Who would condescend to strike down the mere things he does not fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common prize-fighter? Who would stoop to be fearless - like a tree? Fight the thing that you fear.
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fear
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G.K. Chesterton |
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5d72871
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Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written. It is only too probable that I shall never write it, so I will use it symbolically here; for it was a symbol of the same truth.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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dfe0ce5
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paradox simply means a certain defiant joy which belongs to belief.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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0e86010
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We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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db4ef10
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A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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f38b3f9
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The mere machinery of voting is not democracy, though at present it is not easy to effect any simpler democratic method. But
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G.K. Chesterton |
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a963b0e
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There was a man who had a fly in his eye when he looked through the telescope, and he discovered that there was a most incredible dragon in the moon.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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ef7943f
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The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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8a8ebb5
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I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position at this moment.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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cfccce6
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That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For ..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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243bdf6
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For the perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them; what we call its triviality is really the tag-ends of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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c318b97
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Then, what," asked Turnbull, very slowly, as he softly picked a flower, "what is the difference between Christ and Satan?" "It is quite simple," replied the Highlander. "Christ descended into hell; Satan fell into it." "Does it make much odds?" asked the free-thinker. "It makes all the odds," said the other. "One of them wanted to go up and went down; the other wanted to go down and went up. A god can be humble, a devil can only be humbled...
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G.K. Chesterton |
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62bc6b2
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Mr. Audley, never having been in politics, treated them a little more seriously. Sometimes he even embarrassed the company by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal and a Conservative.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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2d6a90c
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In most commercial ways we're a pretty forward country. In these moral ways we're content to be a pretty backward country.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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a7d6e98
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I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a careless simile. A Socialist means a man who thinks a walking-stick like an umbrella because they both go into the umbrella-stand. Yet they are as different as a battle-ax and a bootjack.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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140bef6
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The servants of God who had been a besieged garrison became a marching army; the ways of the world were filled as with thunder with the trampling of their feet and far ahead of that ever swelling host went a man singing; as simply he had sung that morning in the winter woods, where he walked alone.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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62e3eb5
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The vision which has been so faintly suggested in these pages has never been confined to monks or even to friars. It has been an inspiration to innumerable crowds of ordinary married men and women; living lives like our own, only entirely different. That morning glory which St. Francis spread over the earth and sky has lingered as a secret sunshine under a multitude of roots and in a multitude of rooms. In societies like ours nothing is kn..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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0b4277a
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Sir Arthur St. Clare, as I have already said, was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him. When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else's Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs. St. Clare was an old Anglo-Indian Protestant soldier. N..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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8b57df2
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If you want to succeed at whist, either be a good whist-player, or play with marked cards. You may want a book about jumping; you may want a book about whist; you may want a book about cheating at whist. But you cannot want a book about Success...You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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91e646c
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Is that story really true?" he asked. "Oh, no," said Michael, airily. "It is a parable. It is a parable of you and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the Cross; but you end by breaking up the habitable world."
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G.K. Chesterton |
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e25e765
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All habits are bad habits. (...) Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
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madness
rebellionllion
tamed
habits
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G.K. Chesterton |
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4d18899
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If you let loose a law, it will do as a dog does. It will obey its own nature, not yours. Such sense as you have put into the law (or the dog) will be fulfilled.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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f27fc32
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The truth is that the old parliamentary oligarchy[Pg 227] abandoned their first line of trenches because they had by that time constructed a second line of defence. It consisted in the concentration of colossal political funds in the private and irresponsible power of the politicians, collected by the sale of peerages and more important things, and expended on the jerrymandering of the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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0419534
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Jus man patikat. No ta izriet sekojosais: es justos apbedinats apmeram divarpus minutes, ja man naktos dzirdet, ka esat miris mokpilna nave.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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7ae2bde
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There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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2f22936
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For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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c5a6839
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That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of fai..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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79c5064
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Angus...had hitherto maintained hilarious ease from motives of mental hygiene...
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G.K. Chesterton |
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2db2748
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he sometimes felt himself to be a painfully prosaic person, but by the same token he knew he was incurably sane.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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e01a78c
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We can no more analyse such peace in the soul than we can conceive in our heads the whole enormous and dizzy equilibrium by which, out of suns roaring like infernos and heavens toppling like precipices, He has hanged the world upon nothing.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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9858f11
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And under all this vast illusion of the cosmopolitan planet, with its empires and its Reuter's agency, the real life of man goes on concerned with this tree or that temple, with this harvest or that drinking-song, totally uncomprehended, totally untouched. And it watches from its splendid parochialism, possibly with a smile of amusement, motor-car civilization going its triumphant way, outstripping time, consuming space, seeing all and seei..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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c0b9b3d
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I want to be taken to a madhouse," said Turnbull distinctly, giving the direction with a sort of precision. "I want to go back to exactly the same lunatic asylum from which I came." "Why?" asked the unknown. "Because I want a little sane and wholesome society," answered Turnbull."
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G.K. Chesterton |