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23e17e3
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He asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren't
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G.K. Chesterton |
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13ed7fe
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Flippancy is a flower whose roots are often underground in the subconsciousness.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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5d27054
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Those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.
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skepticism
pessimism
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G.K. Chesterton |
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32d2794
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Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It's that we have only seen 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.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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cccd290
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The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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350eb8d
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I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this book. It is a collection of crude and shapeless papers upon current or rather flying subjects; and they must be published pretty much as they stand. They were written, as a rule, at the last moment; they were handed in the moment before it was too late, and I do not think that our commonwealth would h..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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79fb65a
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It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke -- that may be, perhaps, the real end an..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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fe80185
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All the terms used in the science books, 'law,' 'necessity,' 'order,' 'tendency,' and so on, are really unintellectual .... The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitche..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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b74b756
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When I was a boy there were two curious men running about who were called the optimist and the pessimist. I constantly used the words myself, but I cheerfully confess that I never had any very special idea of what they meant. The only thing which might be considered evident was that they could not mean what they said; for the ordinary verbal explanation was that the optimist thought this world as good as it could be, while the pessimist tho..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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f3f744a
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Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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723f0ea
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It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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378c596
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Employers will give time to eat, time to sleep; they are in terror of a time to think
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G.K. Chesterton |
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24f2650
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The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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72cfaaf
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We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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b2dd89d
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Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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faf8036
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Whether the human mind can advance or not, is a question too little discussed, for nothing can be more dangerous than to found our social philosophy on any theory which is debatable but has not been debated.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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358bbb0
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We are learning to do a great many clever things...The next great task will be to learn not to do them.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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0822670
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We are talking about an artist; What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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07ec12b
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For most people there is a fascinating inconsistency in the position of St. Francis. He expressed in loftier and bolder language than any earthly thinker the conception that laughter is as divine as tears. He called his monks the mountebanks of God. He never forgot to take pleasure in a bird as it flashed past him, or a drop of water as it fell from his finger; he was perhaps the happiest of the sons of men. Yet this man undoubtedly founded..
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joy
hope
love
saints
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G.K. Chesterton |
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ea35a62
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It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object or ideal. But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress
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G.K. Chesterton |
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d5cf5d0
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It is not true that we have never been broken. We have been broken upon the wheel. It is not true that we have never descended from these thrones. We have descended into hell. We were complaining of unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered insolently to accuse us of happiness. I repel the slander; we have not been happy.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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e3b21f4
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I feel grateful for the slight sprain which has introduced this mysterious and fascinating division between one of my feet and the other. The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost. In one of my feet I can feel how strong and splendid a foot is; in the other I can realise how very much otherwise it might have been. The moral of the thing is wholly exhilarating. This world and all our powers in it are far more awful and bea..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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d66dc87
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But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be to make use of the word 'artificial.' Nothing in the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because the exhibit vanity and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in t..
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vanity
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G.K. Chesterton |
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561eac9
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You do believe it,' he said. 'You do believe everything. We all believe everything, even when we deny everything. The denyers believe. The unbelievers believe. Don't you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really contradict: that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return; perhaps Strake and I have striven in many shapes, beast against beast and bird against bird..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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cd45da6
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All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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08a9d45
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Quebrantaria yo veinte juramentos, con tal de darle a usted en la cabeza. Ese modo que tiene usted de encender el cigarro, por ejemplo, basta para hacer que un sacerdote quebrante el secreto de la confesion.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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e64d697
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Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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bb83581
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Los estupidos sentimentales de la Revolucion Francesa hablaban de los derechos del Hombre. Pero nosotros odiamos tanto los derechos como los tuertos, y a unos y a otros los abolimos.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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f4c383b
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It is in our own daily life that we are to look for the portents and the prodigies.... Compared with this life, all public life, all fame, all wisdom, is by its nature cramped and cold and small. For on that defined and lighted public stage men are of necessity forced to profess one set of accomplishments, to rise to one rigid standard. It is the utterly unknown people, who can grow in all directions like an exuberant tree.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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32123c6
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He walked on the Embankment once under a dark red sunset. The red river reflected the red sky, and they both reflected his anger. The sky, indeed, was so swarthy, and the light on the river relatively so lurid, that the water almost seemed of fiercer flame than the sunset it mirrored. It looked like a stream of literal fire winding under the vast caverns of a subterranean country.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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7b47de9
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I told Mr. Rook you were disinherited and he rushed back to help you. Mr. Rook is a rather remarkable person." "Oh, chuck it," said Mr. Rook with a hostile air. "Mr. Rook is a monster," said Father Brown with scientific calm. "He is an anachronism, an atavism, a brutal survivor of the Stone Age. If there was one barbarous superstition we all supposed to be utterly extinct and dead in these days, it was that notion about honour and independe..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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87bba46
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it is the fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seems to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of ou..
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future
past
forefathers
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G.K. Chesterton |
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743d9f6
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Flambeau, once the most famous criminal in France and later a very private detective in England, had long retired from both professions. Some say a career of crime had left him with too many scruples for a career of detection. Anyhow, after a life of romantic escapes and tricks of evasion, he had ended at what some might consider an appropriate address; a castle in Spain. [...] Flambeau had casually and almost abruptly fallen in love with a..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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d2d7dfa
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Then the small man suddenly ran after them and said: "I want to get my haircut. I say, do you know a little shop anywhere where they cut hair properly? I keep on having my hair cut, but it keeps on growing again." One of the tall men looked at him with the air of a pained naturalist."
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wit
sarcasm
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G.K. Chesterton |
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a8962e1
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On his last voyage he had seemed on the brink of success and had stood in the prow reciting a grand poem of his own composition to a dim blue promontory in which he recognized one of the capes of Greenland. But it is idle to deny that the general feeling was dampened somehow, when they discovered it was the Cape of Good Hope. In short, the admiral was one of those who keep the world young.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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2857656
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Christianity was beauty created by controlling a million monsters of ugliness . . . modern art and science practically mean having the million monsters and being unable to control them...
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G.K. Chesterton |
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aaa1319
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Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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5ce3a0b
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The modern man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty." This is, logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it."
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G.K. Chesterton |
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4926845
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central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles' Creed) is the best root of energy and sound ethics.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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dd7a6d6
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But trivial as are the topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at something that he has never seen: that is, never realised. He could not write an essay on such a post or wall: he does not know what the post or wa..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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c1892ef
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In waking to the strangeness of the world, many of us become strangers in our own homes. But home is where we start and where we shall someday return. The path between has been marked out for us by a Savior who became the prodigal from heaven, journeying into the far country to bring us home with Him. He is both the end of our exploring and its liberating transformation. It is Jesus who has already profaned the mysteries of God by making th..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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2eccd08
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Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern painters had found there. He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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63ef6a0
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I am the man who knows too much to know anything, or, at any rate, to do anything,
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G.K. Chesterton |
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018fc7e
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I say decisively that nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone
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G.K. Chesterton |