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bcec2b3
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What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.
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rebellion
freedom
autonomy
liberty
laws
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G.K. Chesterton |
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ff1d7ca
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Fairy tales make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
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nature
noticed
observation
fantastic
nature-s-beauty
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G.K. Chesterton |
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a82210b
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But as a matter of fact, another part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren't a priest.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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b7f7f1f
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Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. 'Odd, isn't it,' he said, 'that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?
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thief
repentance
rich
sin
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G.K. Chesterton |
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077896a
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It is ludicrous to suppose that the more sceptical we are the more we see good in everything. It is clear that the more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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35861d5
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If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkeness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by Poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startling and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jew..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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4c5936d
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For my friend said that he opened his intellect as the sun opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening's sake, opening infinitely for ever. But I said that I opened my intellect as I opened my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid. I was doing it at the moment. And as I truly pointed out, it would look uncommonly silly if I went on opening my mouth infinitely, for ever and ever.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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b590b07
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The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.
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family-relationships
neighbors
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G.K. Chesterton |
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19b2d52
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I beseech you, little brothers, that you be as wise as brother Daisy and brother dandelion; for never do they lie awake thinking of tomorrow, yet they have gold crowns like kings and emperors or like Charlemagne in all his glory.
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simplicity
peace
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G.K. Chesterton |
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2658ab0
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The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood without a god.
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local-government
small-is-beautiful
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G.K. Chesterton |
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8324abc
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But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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cb0d9cf
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When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else's Bible?
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G.K. Chesterton |
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e49fe2c
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The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history ..
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classic
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G.K. Chesterton |
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4c368a7
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The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.
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fiction
heresy
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G.K. Chesterton |
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632019f
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But again I seem to hear, like a kind of echo, an answer from beyond the world. 'You will have real obligations, and therefore real adventures when you get to my Utopia. But the hardest obligation and the steepest adventure is to get there.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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2dd09cc
|
Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One "settles down" into a sort of selfish seriousness; but one has to rise to a gay self-forgetfulness... Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do... For solemnity flows out of men naturally; b..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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548a7c9
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He felt the full warmth of that pleasure from which the proud shut themselves out; the pleasure which not only goes with humiliation, but which almost is humiliation. Men who have escaped death by a hair have it, and men whose love is returned by a woman unexpectedly, and men whose sins are forgiven them. Everything his eye fell on it feasted on, not aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy eating buns. He relished the sq..
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pleasure
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G.K. Chesterton |
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7033f76
|
Adam Wayne, the conqueror, with his face flung back and his mane like a lion's, stood with his great sword point upwards, the red raiment of his office flapping around him like the red wings of an archangel. And the King saw, he knew not how, something new and overwhelming. The great green trees and the great red robes swung together in the wind. The preposterous masquerade, born of his own mockery, towered over him and embraced the world. ..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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f35991b
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I can hardly conceive of any educated man believing in God at all without believing that God contains in Himself every perfection including eternal joy; and does not require the solar system to entertain Him like a circus.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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5e1fad6
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No one has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking, an uproarious materialism which to many women appears only hoggish. You may call the thing an orgy or a sacrament; it is certainly an essential. It is at root a resistance to the superciliousness of the individual. Nay, its very swaggering and howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdiness there is a sor..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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dada092
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A religion is not the church a man goes to but the cosmos he lives in; and if any sceptic forgets it, the maddest fanatic beating an Orange drum about the Battle of the Boyne is a better philosopher than he.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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27b5426
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The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age
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G.K. Chesterton |
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8931da1
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The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the creation of the sun and moon.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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a988127
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The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to the view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in the most rational of these civilisations. It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Bra..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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c4d0c6b
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Mysticism conceives something transcending experience; religion seeks glimpses of a better good or a worse evil than experience can give. Reincarnation need only extend experiences in the sense of repeating them.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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c435a2d
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One of the Franciscans says later, "A monk should own nothing but his harp"; meaning, I suppose, that he should value nothing but his song, the song with which it was his business as a minstrel to serenade every castle and cottage, the song of the joy of the Creator in His creation and the beauty of the brotherhood of men."
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G.K. Chesterton |
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1c2ecaa
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We shall have gone deeper than the deeps of heaven and grown older than the oldest angels before we feel, even in its first faint vibrations, the everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates and loves the world.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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bc774a6
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On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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66e9e40
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Divinity is great enough to be divine; it is great enough to call itself divine. But as humanity grows greater, it grows less and less likely to do so. God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it.
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humilty
divinity
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G.K. Chesterton |
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ca6a6e8
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just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant,--just as we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and more thickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts, grow taller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight, so we know and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human poli..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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eafe3cc
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A man who says that no patriot should attack the [war] until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men...he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all...Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know..
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war
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G.K. Chesterton |
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89759e2
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Men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion.
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religion
worldview
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G.K. Chesterton |
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be17a40
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Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories...cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.
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writing
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G.K. Chesterton |
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53a8349
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There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever known among men... these things are about nothing; they are about what is called Success. On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books. T..
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G.K. Chesterton |
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88839a2
|
even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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ce1736d
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He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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24701ca
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The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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348557a
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Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.
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isolation
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G.K. Chesterton |
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9a77746
|
I do not deny, but strongly affirm, the right of the State to interfere to cure a great evil. I say that in this case it would interfere to create a great evil; and I am not going to be turned from the discussion of that direct issue to bottomless botherations about Socialism and Individualism, or the relative advantages of always turning to the right and always turning to the left.
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socialism
politics
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G.K. Chesterton |
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a7e2c28
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I do not, in my private capacity, believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb; nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking on his soul, and denying its dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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a3df349
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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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G.K. Chesterton |
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aa379a3
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The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe!
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risk
force
coercion
|
G.K. Chesterton |
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b9d97d4
|
Confetti, bonbons, artillery.
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G.K. Chesterton |
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ab82053
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I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.
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belief
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G.K. Chesterton |