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bf49c9c
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What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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e5c6374
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when we belong to the Church we belong to something which is outside all of us; which is outside everything you talk about, outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but it does not belong to them. If we all fell dead suddenly, the Church would still somehow exist in God. Confound it all, don't you see that I am more sure of its existence than I am of my own existence?
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G.K. Chesterton |
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7d1e54c
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The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already sovered with scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulant as humanity.
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future
past
tradition
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G.K. Chesterton |
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3e0c044
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And when he became conscious of a human figure dark against the silver stream, sitting on a large boulder and looking rather like a large bird, it was perhaps with some of the premonitions proper to a man who meets the strangest friendship of his life.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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0d07773
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One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it.
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nature
obstacles
running-away
skeletons
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G.K. Chesterton |
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cd178ab
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I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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c0ea337
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The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain and tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him; the glow of the seabather comes after the icy shok of the sea bath.
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pleasure
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G.K. Chesterton |
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35f210e
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Revolutionists amke a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform the reform, which is often very much wanted.
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revolutionist
reform
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G.K. Chesterton |
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8385b65
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We want the will of the people, not the votes of the people; and to give a man a vote against his will is to make voting more important than the democracy it declares.
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voting
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G.K. Chesterton |
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c822e3e
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But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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5f4a1d9
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It is no good to tell an atheist that he is an atheist; or to charge a denier of immortality with the infamy of denying it; or to imagine that one can force an opponent to admit he is wrong, by proving that he is wrong on somebody else's principles, but not on his own. After the great example of St. Thomas, the principle stands, or ought always to have stood established; that we must either not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on h..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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66470bd
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Let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey. Now, if we are to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake. There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and gen..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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71360ed
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Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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adeb14a
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The poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt." "There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick."
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rebellion
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G.K. Chesterton |
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e3fd2c3
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The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god b..
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religion
moon
transcendentalism
sun
mysticism
moonlight
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G.K. Chesterton |
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8226dc8
|
He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a Lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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b1cca25
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Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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4eb1804
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There is a limit to human charity," said Lady Outram, trembling all over. "There is," said Father Brown dryly, "and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity. You must forgive me if I was not altogether crushed by your contempt for my uncharitableness today; or by the lectures you read me about pardon for every sinner. For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only..
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forgiveness
crime
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G.K. Chesterton |
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3ec9035
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The sceptics, like bees, give their one sting and die.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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746c3a7
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Every man is dangerous," said the old man without moving, "who cares only for one thing."
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G.K. Chesterton |
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3a980f6
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Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung; The world was very old indeed.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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2346be9
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Each thing that obeys law [has] the glory and isolation of the anarchist.
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submission
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G.K. Chesterton |
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9000597
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The great man will come when all of us are feeling great, not when all of us are feeling small. He will ride in at some splendid moment when we all feel that we could do without him. "We are then able to answer in some manner the question, "Why have we no great men?" We have no great men chiefly because we are always looking for them. We are connoisseurs of greatness, and connoisseurs can never be great; we are fastidious, that is, we are s..
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leadership
inspirational
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G.K. Chesterton |
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f7e2c75
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All previous ages have sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realize what is really the right life, what was really the good man. A definite part of the modern world has come beyond question to the conclusion that there is no answer to these questions, that the most that we can do is to set up a few notice-boards at places of obvious danger, to warn men, for instance, against drinking themselves to death, or ignoring the mere existenc..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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4932037
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You say you are a poet of law; I saw you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden.
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poetry
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G.K. Chesterton |
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58f7fd2
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We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not ..
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ecstasy
art
forgotten
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G.K. Chesterton |
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9c254ab
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So the mythological imagination moves as it were in circles, hovering either to find a place or to return to it. In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity in the idea of seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and mysterious levity about all the places found.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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82dae5b
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You attacked reason," said Father Brown. "It's bad theology."
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G.K. Chesterton |
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d85e3fe
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Men in England are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by brutes who refuse them bread, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern, and therefore wish to enslave.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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d1f530f
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Somehow one can never manage to be an atheist.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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47f9ae8
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The little sins are sometimes harder to confess than the big ones--but that's why it's so important to confess them.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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87b6ba8
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She(Joan of Arc) put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into her practice. In modern Imperial wars, the case is reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy.
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dream
sentiment
joan-of-arc
practical
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G.K. Chesterton |
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33a1f19
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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. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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dd56757
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All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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803c5f1
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Something lay in the shadow at the foot of the ridge, as stiff as the stick of the fallen rocket; and the man who knew too much knew what is worth knowing.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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6c69352
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I know the Unknown God," said the little priest, with an unconscious grandeur of certitude that stood up like a granite tower. "I know his name; it is Satan. The true God was made flesh and dwelt among us. And I say to you, wherever you find men ruled merely by mystery, it is the mystery of iniquity. If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think so..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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c891796
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He discovered the fact that all romantics know--that adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like song.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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0b382c7
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Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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e90153f
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It is quaint that people talk about separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
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education
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G.K. Chesterton |
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3729ce4
|
In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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320139b
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The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasent. He is always breathing an air of locality. London is a place to be compared to Chicage; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo. But Timbuctoo is not a place, sonce there, at least, live men who regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the winds of the world. The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men; and is thinking of the thin..
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traveling
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G.K. Chesterton |
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42e766a
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I have never been to St. John's Wood. I dare not. I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to come upon a blood red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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965b30c
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Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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e88878a
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Only a man who knows nothing of motors talks of motoring without petrol; only a man who knows nothing of reason talks of reasoning without strong, undisputed first principles.
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G.K. Chesterton |