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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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.. | right-and-wrong terrorism | 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 .. | reform repeal | 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. | humor humour 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 | ||
| bcec2b3 | 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. | autonomy freedom laws liberty rebellion | G.K. Chesterton | |
| ff1d7ca | Fairy tales make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. | fantastic nature nature-s-beauty noticed observation | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 46d0c26 | The greatest influence in writing was G. K. Chesterton who never used a useless word, who saw the value of a paradox, and avoided what was trite. | paradox writing | Fulton J. Sheen | |
| a82210b | But as a matter of fact, another part of my trade, too, made me sure you weren't a priest. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| b7f7f1f | 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? | repentance rich sin thief | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 077896a | 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. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 35861d5 | 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.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 4c5936d | 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. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| b590b07 | 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. | family-relationships neighbors | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 19b2d52 | 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. | peace simplicity | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 2658ab0 | The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood without a god. | local-government small-is-beautiful | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 8324abc | But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| cb0d9cf | When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else's Bible? | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| e49fe2c | 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 .. | classic | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 4c368a7 | The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else. | fiction heresy | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 632019f | 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. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 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.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 548a7c9 | 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.. | pleasure | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 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. .. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| f35991b | 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. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 5e1fad6 | 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.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| dada092 | 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. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 27b5426 | The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| f321e17 | Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child's life in Oxford. Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming? | innocence irony politics rivalry | Philip Pullman |