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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 198f887 | The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world. That I should have come at last upon so singular a body was, I may say without vanity, not altogether singular, for I have a mania for belonging to as many societies as pos.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 2b0c73f | Sunday is a fixed star," he said. "You shall see him a falling star," said Syme, and put on his hat. The decision of his gesture drew the Professor vaguely to his feet. "Have you any idea," he asked, with a sort of benevolent bewilderment, "exactly where you are going?" "Yes," replied Syme shortly, "I am going to prevent this bomb being thrown in Paris." "Have you any conception how?" inquired the other. "No," said Syme with equal decision... | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 0f3d9e3 | Stop, stop, stop!' he cried; "stop talking a minute, for I see half. Will God give me strength? Will my brain make the one jump and see all? Heaven help me! I used to be fairly good at thinking. . . Will my head split - or will it see? I see half - I only see half." | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 456ad94 | No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist. | morality the-law secularism | G.K. Chesterton | |
| c840887 | The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay; Round us in antic order their crippled vices came-- Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| e1d1967 | A head can be beaten small enough until it fits the hat. | violence | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 31fbe35 | I have been asked to explain what I meant by saying that "Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity." I have no notion when I said it or where I said it, or even whether I said it; in the sense that I do not now remember ever saying it at all. But I do know why I said it; if I ever said it at all." | humor | G.K. Chesterton | |
| ff45e5d | By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference - Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation - Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| fe3318a | General theories are everywhere condemned; the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint. We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: 'The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.' We are more and more to discuss details i.. | postmodernity generalizations modernism | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 6dbe801 | Now this is the attitude which I attack. It is the huge heresy of Precedent. It is the view that because we have got into a mess we must grow messier to suit it; that because we have taken a wrong turn some time ago we must go forward and not backwards; that because we have lost our way we must lose our map also; and because we have missed our ideal, we must forget it. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| d0d2bf6 | The men of the east may search the scrolls, For sure fates and fame, But the men that drink the blood of God go singing to their shame. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 284e8a8 | There has arisen in our time a most singular fancy: the fancy that when things go very wrong we need a practical man. It would be far truer to say, that when things go very wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly, at least, we need a theorist. A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they w.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| efd9cb5 | There are, I believe, some who still deny that England is governed by an oligarchy. It is quite enough for me to know that a man might have gone to sleep some thirty years ago over the day's newspaper and woke up last week over the later newspaper, and fancied he was reading about the same people. In one paper he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. In th.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 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. | family education 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 |