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d1f26fc
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There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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64cec95
|
Father Brown: I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland, I only said it was always dangerous.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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9a5ed44
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Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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7ba7019
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Private lives are more important than public reputations.
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reputation
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G.K. Chesterton |
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bf10012
|
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend th..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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04606da
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But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it nasty.
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socialism
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G.K. Chesterton |
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e2ef450
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The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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d260018
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As we have taken the circle as a symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as a symbol at once of mystery and health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its head a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for eve..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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d222f86
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The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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cd1d52a
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In all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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1c58530
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He stared and talked at the girl's red hair and amused face for what seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which were to follow, th..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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7a99586
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A man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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98727d0
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Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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2e0530b
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America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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5a6b823
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The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In a word, what is unique is not America but what is called Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not trying to Anglicise thousand of French cooks or Italian organ..
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assimilation
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G.K. Chesterton |
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5f03b54
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What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.
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inspirational
gk-chesterton
humility
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G.K. Chesterton |
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061d4ee
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The man who said, "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed," put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised." The man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and greener grass, and a more startling sun. Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains; blessed..
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inspirational
surprise
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G.K. Chesterton |
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82c2be0
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I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,' answered Father Brown. 'The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.
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heaven
faith
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G.K. Chesterton |
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d242588
|
Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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245e213
|
Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place."
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religion
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G.K. Chesterton |
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f31090d
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The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can't play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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b229e1b
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If Innocent is happy, it is because he is innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting..
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innocence
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G.K. Chesterton |
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f1011ac
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The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.
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modernism
snobbery
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G.K. Chesterton |
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4229a29
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I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.
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criminology
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G.K. Chesterton |
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06433b9
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It was not the house that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife was better than all women, and yet I could not feel it.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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7eb4b3f
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My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true prophecies.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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13a1224
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the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.
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humour
humor
jokes
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G.K. Chesterton |
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24b8859
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Sirs, I am but a nameless man, A rhymester without a home, Yet since I come of the Wessex clay And carry the cross of Rome, I will even answer the mighty earl That asked of Wessex men Why they be meek and monkish folk, And bow to the White Lord's broken yoke; What sign have we save blood and smoke? Here is my answer then. That on you is fallen the shadow, And not upon the Name; That though we scatter and though we fly, And you hang over us..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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0375dd9
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It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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6a6313b
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We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return to at evening.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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7f9f0a1
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If we are calm," replied the policeman, "it is the calm of organized resistance." "Eh?" said Syme, staring. "The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle," pursued the policeman. "The composure of an army is the anger of a nation."
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composure
calm
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G.K. Chesterton |
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43730b6
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A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man -- the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle.
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worldview
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G.K. Chesterton |
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de081e8
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It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conq..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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112efc9
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When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.
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honesty
truth
liars
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G.K. Chesterton |
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3c4b614
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When Nietszche says, "A new commandment I give to you, be hard" he is really saying, "A new commandment I give to you, be dead." Sensibility is the definition of life."
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G.K. Chesterton |
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4556c41
|
This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.
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spirituality
creed
custom
power
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G.K. Chesterton |
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61b72c4
|
The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason.
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marriage
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G.K. Chesterton |
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0c8a80e
|
We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live,..
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fanatic
irrationality
secularism
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G.K. Chesterton |
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11487cb
|
Do you see this lantern? cried Syme in a terrible voice.'Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing..
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mystery
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G.K. Chesterton |
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d788ba6
|
How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.
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dark-ages
ignorance
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G.K. Chesterton |
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b77bf7a
|
Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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e250ebe
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It may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colors that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of law; I say 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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poets
respectable
comets
cruel-colors
earthquakes
garden
night
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G.K. Chesterton |
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19dbd49
|
Perhaps we are both doing what we think right. But what we think right is so damned different that there can be nothing between us in the way of concession. There is nothing possible between us but honor and death.
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right
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G.K. Chesterton |
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8eaca72
|
But when fundamentals are doubted, as at present, we must try to recover the candour and wonder of the child; the unspoilt realism and objectivity of innocence. Or if we cannot do that, we must try at least to shake off the cloud of mere custom and see the thing as new, if only by seeing it as unnatural. Things that may well be familiar so long as familiarity breeds affection had much better become unfamiliar when familiarity breeds contemp..
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novelty
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G.K. Chesterton |