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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d14ddc3 | There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sen.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 8c0c4cd | A saint is long past any desire for distinction; he is the only sort of superior man who has never been a superior person. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| fff5a6f | A man who thinks a great deal about himself will try to be many-sided, attempt a theatrical excellence at all points, will try to be an encyclopaedia of culture, and his own real personality will be lost in that false universalism. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| cdac5c9 | Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who really ought to have been eaten by lions. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| cfcd935 | We will have have the dead at our councils. The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by tombstones. It is all quite regular and official, for most tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a cross. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 362ccb7 | If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 10705b8 | It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 79d7049 | 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 in art, politics, literature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does .. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 067a217 | This very pride in keeping his word was that he was keeping it to miscreants. It was his last triumph over these lunatics to go down into their dark room and die for something that they could not even understand. The barrel-organ seemed to give the marching tune with the energy and the mingled noises of a whole orchestra; and he could hear deep and rolling, under all the trumpets of the pride of life, the drums of the pride of death. | life pride | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 78d99a2 | What had happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world was coloured by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural passions. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 2ed4d97 | I look forward optimistically to a healthy, happy world as soon as its children are taught the principles of simple and rational living. We must return to nature and nature's God. | Paramahansa Yogananda | ||
| 0c0dd04 | Be honest with yourself. The world is not honest with you. | Paramahansa Yogananda | ||
| 9fa5020 | If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact that it is wrong. Some will call it insane; that is, will accuse it of a deficiency of intelligence. This is not necessarily true at all. You could not tell whether the act was unintelligent or not unless you knew my grandmother. Some will call it vulgar,.. | death efficiency evil good insanity journalism manners | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 10f2ade |
palabras de G.K. Chesterton, <|
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Alexandre Havard |
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| 06c49b7 | A waiter came swiftly along the room, and then stopped dead. His stoppage was as silent as his tread; but all those vague and kindly gentlemen were so used to the utter smoothness of the unseen machinery which surrounded and supported their lives, that a waiter doing anything unexpected was a start and a jar. They felt as you and I would feel if the inanimate world disobeyed-- if a chair ran away from us. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 8fd0487 | The modern instinct is that if the heart of man is evil, there is nothing that remains good. But the older feeling was that if the heart of man was ever so evil, there was something that remained good--goodness remained good. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 121563d | Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. "He that will lose his life, the same shall save it," is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut .. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| f1db101 | The sages have a hundred maps to give That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree They rattle reason out through many a sieve That stores the sand but lets the gold go free | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| bbb57ed | He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 6bfdaea | He defended respectability with violence and exaggeration. | fundamentalism | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 71d9bfe | Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| be7355a | Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 8ab6a23 | Let me explain a little: Certain things are bad so far as they go, such as pain, and no one, not even a lunatic, calls a tooth-ache good in itself; but a knife which cuts clumsily and with difficulty is called a bad knife, which it certainly is not. It is only not so good as other knives to which men have grown accustomed. A knife is never bad except on such rare occasions as that in which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the midd.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| a1af75f | He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. | reactionaries | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 2160be1 | I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 5e6ec8b | Happiness is a state of the soul; a state in which our natures are full of the wine of an ancient youth, in which banquets last for ever, and roads lead everywhere, where all things are under the exuberant leadership of faith, hope, and charity. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 9d3de4e | She was not in the least afraid of loneliness, because she was not afraid of devils. I think they were afraid of her. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 9a749ef | The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything. | modern-world separation the-sexes | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 468d99f | We're all really dependent in nearly everything, and we all make a fuss about being independent in something. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 446a7cb | To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school. Nor can I imagine anything that would do humanity more good than the advent of a race of Supermen, for them to fight like dragons. If the Superman is better than we, of course we need not fight him; but in that case, why not call him a Saint? But if he is merely stronger (whether physically, mentally, or morally stronger, I do not care a farthing), then he ought to have to reckon w.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 559d78e | When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 18cd82a | If a man prefers nothing I can give him nothing. But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need so to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfort.. | classic | G.K. Chesterton | |
| dc02e7b | Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, We must not hit each other in the holy place. They gained their morality by guarding their religion. They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous. They did not cultivate cleanliness. They purified themselves for t.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| fe395dc | The great error consists in supposing that poetry is an unnatural form of language. We should all like to speak poetry at the moment when we truly live, and if we do not speak it, it is because we have an impediment in our speech. It is not song that is the narrow or artificial thing, it is conversation that is a broken and stammering attempt at song. When we see men in a spiritual extravaganza, like Cyrano de Bergerac, speaking in rhyme, i.. | prose song speech | G.K. Chesterton | |
| dd323f1 | They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named: Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| a036605 | You have no business to be an unbeliever. You ought to stand for all the things these stupid people call superstitions. Come now, don't you think there's a lot in those old wives' tales about luck and charms and so on, silver bullets included? What do you say about them as a Catholic?' 'I say I'm an agnostic,' replied Father Brown, smiling. 'Nonsense,' said Aylmer impatiently. 'It's your business to believe things.' 'Well, I do believe so.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| f414375 | I'm afraid I'm a practical man,' said the doctor with gruff humour, 'and I don't bother much about religion and philosophy.' 'You'll never be a practical man till you do,' said Father Brown. 'Look here, doctor; you know me pretty well; I think you know I'm not a bigot. You know I know there are all sorts in all religions; good men in bad ones and bad men in good ones. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 0910e2f | It is as if a man were asked, 'What is the use of a hammer?' and answered, 'To make hammers'; and when asked, 'And of those hammers, what is the use?' answered, 'To make hammers again'. Just as such a man would be perpetually putting off the question of the ultimate use of carpentry, so Mr. Wells and all the rest of us are by these phrases successfully putting off the question of the ultimate value of the human life. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 6626b8c | I perceive that it is far more practical to begin at the beginning and discuss theories. I see that the men who killed each other about the orthodoxy of the Homoousion were far more sensible than the people who are quarrelling about the Education Act. For the Christian dogmatists were trying to establish a reign of holiness, and trying to get defined, first of all, what was really holy. But our modern educationists are trying to bring about.. | orthodoxy postmodernism skepticism | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 2c490dd | His principle can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive. He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect, that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world. For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property; for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to his own ho.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 1c5bc7b | A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues. | vice virtue | G.K. Chesterton | |
| e4a9f0c | Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| f5ca6f9 | Father Brown looked him full in his frowning face. "Yes," he said, "I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread." | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 59acfc9 | If he had begun with the human soul--that is, if he had begun on himself--he would have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed in. He would have found, to put the matter shortly, that a permanent possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self, and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. And the weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it .. | G.K. Chesterton |