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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| dc6b79e | British writer G. K. Chesterton's reply to an invitation by the Times to write an essay on the subject "What's Wrong with the World?" Chesterton's response: Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely, G. K. Chesterton" | Dale Carnegie | ||
| 74179af | The man who cannot believe his senses, and the man who cannot believe anything else, are both insane, but their insanity is proved not by any error in their argument, but by the manifest mistake of their whole lives. They have both locked themselves up in two boxes, painted inside with the sun and stars; they are both unable to get out, the one into the health and happiness of heaven, the other even into the health and happiness of the eart.. | materialism mysticism | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 551f246 | We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 72b4c3f | There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 211ec85 | When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people. If the Bedouin Arab does not know how to read, some English missionary or schoolmaster must be sent to teach him to read, but no one ever says, 'This schoolmaster does not know how to ride on a camel; let us pay a Bedouin to teach him.' You say your civilisation will include all talents. Will it? Do you really m.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| a345f3a | Now I have no notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones. On the day that any copybook maxim is carried out there will be something like an earthquake on the earth. There is only one thing new that can be done under the sun; and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a blue day in June, .. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 64a13fd | The only persons who seem to have nothing to do with the education of the children are the parents. | education family parenting parents | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 5ecdc1d | In the lower classes the school master does not work for the parent, but against the parent. Modern education meanshanding down the customs of the minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority. | schooling | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 7ee2a8e | To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 7df19ea | Materialists and madmen never have doubts. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 949494c | The priest looked puzzled also, as if at his own thoughts; he sat with knotted brow and then said abruptly: 'You see, it's so easy to be misunderstood. All men matter. You matter. I matter. It's the hardest thing in theology to believe. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 7ff0482 | Oh, what's the good of talking about men?" cried Mary impatiently; "why, one might as well be a lady novelist or some horrid thing. There aren't any men. There are no such people. There's a man; and whoever he is he's quite different." | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 313a7a6 | 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. | sanity | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 723801d | His soul swayed in a vertigo of moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made to a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as the square beneath him. He had, on the other other hand, only to keep his antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber. Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfort.. | common-sense honor | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 019eede | A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes," remarked Crook, with some impatience; "and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it." | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 45175f9 | If ever I murdered somebody," he added quite simply, "I dare say it might be an Optimist." | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 4339995 | The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 7f0555b | If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing, keep behind him. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 2002f4c | Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| eec51ac | The fierce poet of the Middle Ages wrote, "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here," over the gates of the lower world. The emancipated poets of to-day have written it over the gates of this world. But if we are to understand the story which follows, we must erase that apocalyptic writing, if only for an hour. We must recreate the faith of our fathers, if only as an artistic atmosphere. If, then, you are a pessimist, in reading this story, fore.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| cfbd7d1 | For the world of science and evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 6ad69ea | The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world. | G. K. Chesterton | ||
| 4cee174 | It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers. | witch-hunts | G.K. Chesterton | |
| d6e2c1f | The truth is people who worship health cannot remain healthy on the point. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 5a5f00b | all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 953499c | Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do... Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine... He was damned by John Calvin... Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| b79ba96 | No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he's realised exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about 'criminals,' as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he's got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he's squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is some.. | introspection | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 20ad0ea | The only possible excuse for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| ce50f1d | There's some that came here never believing they were dead. They insisted all the way that they were alive, it was a mistake, someone would have to pay; made no difference. There's others who longed to be dead when they were alive, poor souls; lives full of pain or misery; killed themselves for a chance of a blessed rest, and found that nothing had changed except for the worse, and this time there was no escape; you can't make yourself aliv.. | Philip Pullman | ||
| 0467ffa | Has anyone ever added a single hour to the length of his life by worrying about it? | Philip Pullman | ||
| 1d09218 | in writing like this, he was letting truth from beyond time into history, and thus making history the handmaid of posterity and not its governor... | Philip Pullman | ||
| 96e398a | And barely ten minutes later the soft sound of wingbeats came to their ears, and Balthamos stood up eagerly. The next moment, the two angels were embracing, and Will, gazing into the flames, saw their mutual affection. More than affection: they loved each other with a passion. | Philip Pullman | ||
| 73e9857 | And that was how sin came into the world," he said, "sin and shame and death. It came the moment their daemons became fixed." "But..." Lyra struggled to find the words she wanted: "but it en't true, is it? Not true like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn't really an Adam and Eve? The Cassington Scholar told me it was just a kind of fairy tale." "The Cassington Scholarship is traditionally given to a freethinker; i.. | Philip Pullman | ||
| 3c10cc8 | Perhaps some particles move backward in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don't understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are. | Philip Pullman | ||
| 8b42519 | Waste of time," said the leper. "There's a dozen or more beggars who come here every day, pretending to be cripples, hiring themselves out to the holy men. A couple of drachmas and they'll swear they've been crippled or blind for years then stage a bloody miraculous recovery. Holy men? Healers? Don't make me laugh." "But this man is different," said Christ. "I remember him," said the blind man. "Jesus. He come here on the sabbath, like a fo.. | miracle religion social-commentary | Philip Pullman | |
| 18f6143 | Make a noise in there and I won't help you. You're on your own. | Philip Pullman | ||
| b1250a0 | That is a question with too complicated an answer. | Philip Pullman | ||
| af66f46 | On THE AMBER SPYGLASS: "If this plotline was a motorist, it would have been arrested for driving while intoxicated, if it had not perished in the horrible drunk accident where it went headlong over the cliff of the author's preachy message, tumbled down the rocky hillside, crashed, and burned." | literature philip-pullman plotting | John C. Wright | |
| 2e6aa13 | Speaking for myself, I've always found great intelligence in a woman a highly attractive feature. | Philip Pullman | ||
| 0c27aeb | Maybe sometimes we don't do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don't want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it's dangerous. We | Philip Pullman | ||
| d9b5107 | Like two moths clumsily bumping together, with no more weight than that, their lips touched. Then before they knew how it happened, they were clinging together, blindly pressing their faces towards each other. | Philip Pullman | ||
| 5a7522a | All things from the north are devilish. | Philip Pullman | ||
| 9a4fcd1 | Then it started to rain, so she went inside and made some coffee and did what she had never done in her life: tried the newspaper crossword. "What a stupid exercise," said her daemon after five minutes. "Words belong in contexts, not pegged out like biological specimens." | Philip Pullman | ||
| 80fcf42 | such a strange tormenting feeling when your daemon was pulling at the link between you; part physical pain deep in the chest, part intense sadness and love. And she knew it was the same for him. Everyone tested it when they were growing up: seeing how far they could pull apart, coming back with intense relief. | Philip Pullman |