|
e752c87
|
A puddle repeats infinity, and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
e60634c
|
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. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible.
|
|
sanity
fanatics
revolt
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
d693ea2
|
For even the most dehumanized modern fantasies depend on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the adventurer must be sane.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
a899cc7
|
Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions. It is the resistance offered to definite ideas by that vague bulk of people whose ideas are indefinite to excess. Bigotry may be called the appalling frenzy of the indifferent. This frenzy of the indifferent is in truth a terrible thing; it has made all monstrous and widely pervading persecutions. In this degree it was not the people who cared who ever persecuted; the ..
|
|
moral-crusade
ideas
fanaticism
oppression
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
65372b2
|
To hurry through one's leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
1012138
|
a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
fd57220
|
Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed: a passage which some have considered as a prophecy of modern journalism.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
0fca4ff
|
Of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is the man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
9c845e6
|
What the gods are supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news. Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. They have not lost the speed and ..
|
|
revival
revolution
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
6418e03
|
Plato in some sense anticipated the Catholic realism, as attacked by the heretical nominalism, by insisting on the equally fundamental fact that ideas are realities; that ideas exist just as men exist. Plato however seemed sometimes almost to fancy that ideas exist as men do not exist; or that the men need hardly be considered where they conflict with the ideas.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
c4e1298
|
People like frequent laughter," answered Father Brown, "but I don't think they like a permanent smile. Cheerfulness without humour is a very trying thing."
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
7478b6b
|
The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
b24d20a
|
When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil's walking parody On all four-footed things. The tattered outlaw of the earth, Of ancient crooked will; Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb, I keep my secret still. Fools! For I also had my hour; One far fierce hour and sweet:
|
|
poem
palm-sunday
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
ec4fa04
|
Every trace of the passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full, that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight.
|
|
moon
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
1b398d0
|
Father Brown: ... one can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
2f83b5f
|
The modern mind is hard to please; and it generally calls the way of Godfrey ferocious and the way of Francis fanatical. That is, it calls any moral method unpractical, when it has just called any practical method immoral.
|
|
secular-dogma
francis-of-assisi
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
b00cdaa
|
The word 'heresy' not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word 'orthodoxy' not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong.
|
|
wrong
orthodoxy
right
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
0fda000
|
Men spoke much in my boyhood about restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it's a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
0393295
|
T]he horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policeman, is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid (several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got used to it. Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of judgment; the..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
5e92c47
|
All that is mere rationalism; the superstition (that is the unreasoning repugnance and terror) is in the person who admits there can be angels but
|
|
superstition
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
310d054
|
I know he is really happy, and yet I can never catch him at it.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
84e815e
|
An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong.
|
|
orthodoxy
church
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
96c9df8
|
What a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
1e1b8b6
|
The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.
|
|
revolution
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
16fa5e1
|
I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
1119de0
|
Does it never strike you that doubt can be a madness, as well as faith? That asking questions may be a disease, as well as proclaiming doctrines? You talk of religious mania! Is there no such thing as irreligious mania?
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
9474c2f
|
These men were conscious of the Fall, if they were conscious of nothing else; and the same is true of all heathen humanity. Those who have fallen may remember the fall, even when they forget the height. Some such tantalising blank or break in memory is at the back of all pagan sentiment.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
8aefa8f
|
Very deep things in our nature, some dim sense of the dependence of great things upon small, some dark suggestion that the things nearest to us stretch far beyond our power, some sacramental feeling of the magic in material substances, and many more emotions past fading out, are in an idea like that of the external soul. The power even in the myths of savages is like the power in the metaphors of poets. The soul of such a metaphor is often ..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
9d3bd2e
|
There is a certain solid use in fools. It is not so much that they rush in where angels fear to tread, but rather that they let out what devils intend to do.
|
|
fools
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
3f34560
|
The wise man will follow a star, low and large and fierce in the heavens, but the nearer he comes to it the smaller and smaller it will grow, till he finds it the humble lantern over some little inn or stable. Not till we know the high things shall we know how lowly they are.
|
|
religious
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
e3faefa
|
I? What am I?" roared the President, and he rose slowly to an incredible height, like some enormous wave about to arch above them and break. "You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the tr..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
8418b3e
|
Naturally, therefore, these people talk about 'a happy time coming'; 'the paradise of the future'; 'mankind freed from the bondage of vice and the bondage of virtue', and so on. And so also the men of the inner circle speak -- the sacred priesthood. They also speak to applauding crowds of the happiness of the future, and of mankind freed at last. But in their mouths" -- and the policeman lowered his voice -- "in their mouths these happy phr..
|
|
terrorism
right-and-wrong
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
85ca954
|
I see everything," he cried, "everything that there is. Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? For the same reason that I had to be alone in the dreadful Council of the Days. So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isola..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
5964bb0
|
Before we congratulate ourselves upon the absence of certain faults from our nation or society, we ought to ask ourselves why it is that these faults are absent. Are we without the fault because we have the opposite virtue? Or are we without the fault because we have the opposite fault?
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
9764e1f
|
One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. The..
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
3354bb6
|
sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
45d8f8a
|
For the moral basis, it is obvious that man's ethical responsibility varies with his knowledge of consequences
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
3219b4c
|
Many great religions, Pagan and Christian, have insisted on wine. Only one, I think, has insisted on Soap. You will find it in the New Testament attributed to the Pharisees.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
2af5cd5
|
ask yourself how many people you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the British elementary schools, as they would abuse the British climate? How few have we met who realized that British education can be altered, but British weather cannot?...For a thousand that regret compulsory education, where is the hundred, or the ten, or the one, who would repeal ..
|
|
repeal
reform
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
2ae45bf
|
it will be generally found that the popular joke is not true to the letter, but is true to the spirit. The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.
|
|
humour
humor
jokes
truths
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
79f071e
|
It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
5d4fe5a
|
What we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. 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
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
fbee1d7
|
the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain.
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |
|
facfde9
|
It is very currently suggested that the modern man is the heir of all the ages, that he has got the good out of these successive human experiments. I know not what to say in answer to this, except to ask the reader to look at the modern man, as I have just looked at the modern man--in the looking-glass. Is it really true that you and I are two starry towers built up of all the most towering visions of the past?
|
|
|
G.K. Chesterton |