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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 05441e8 | In a word, God paints in many colors; but he never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. In a sense our age has realized this fact, and expressed it in our sullen costume. For if it were really true that white was a blank and colorless thing, negative and non-committal, then white would be used instead of black and grey for the funereal dress of this pessimistic period. Which is not the case. Meanwh.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| b9e3877 | It does not, in the conventional phrase, accept the conclusions of science, for the simple reason that science has not concluded. To conclude is to shut up; and the man of science is not at all likely to shut up. | science | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 777c837 | The present importance of the Book of Job cannot be expressed adequately even by saying that it is the most interesting of ancient books. We may almost say of the Book of Job that it is the most interesting of modern books. In truth, of course, neither of the two phrases covers the matter, because fundamental human religion and fundamental human irreligion are both at once old and new; philosophy is either eternal or it is not philosophy. T.. | philosophy religion truth worldview | G.K. Chesterton | |
| f81d272 | He declares his privacy is temporary and justified, and promises to explain before the wedding. That is all that anyone knows for certain, but Mrs MacNab will tell you a great deal more than even she is certain of. You know how the tales grow like grass on such a patch of ignorance as that. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 910a0e2 | Of real sensational journalism, as it exists in France, in Ireland, and in America, we have no trace in this country. When a journalist in Ireland wishes to create a thrill, he creates a thrill worth talking about. He denounces a leading Irish member for corruption, or he charges the whole police system with a wicked and definite conspiracy. When a French journalist desires a frisson there is a frisson; he discovers, let us say, that the Pr.. | sensationalism | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 8bd1829 | They are constantly colonists and emigrants ; they have the name of being at home in every country. But they are in exile in their own country. They are torn between love of home and love of something else; of which the sea may be the explanation or may be only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme which is the finest line in English literature and the dumb refrain of all English poems, 'Over the hills and far away. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 187b537 | How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win. --G. K. Chesterton | Samuel Chand | ||
| ee06caa | Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world. | fiction literature | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 8882093 | The publisher said of somebody, 'That man will get on; he believes in himself.' [...] I said to him, 'Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of Supermen. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.'.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 53b0d9d | And the beasts of the earth and the birds looked down, In a wild solemnity, On a stranger sight than a sylph or elf, On one man laughing at himself Under the greenwood tree- The giant laughter of Christian men That roars through a thousand tales, Where greed is an ape and pride is an ass, And Jack's away with his master's lass, And the miser is banged with all his brass, The farmer with all his flails; Tales that tumble and tales that trick.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 6f2569d | The resurrection of Jesus is not just a happy ending to the gospel story; it is the dawn of a new creation. No one captures this idea better than G. K. Chesterton in the close of part one of his classic work, The Everlasting Man. 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.. | Brian Zahnd | ||
| 06aa42e | Many of the rich took to scepticism exactly as the poor took to drink; because it was a way out. But in any case, the man who had made a mistake not only refused to unmake it, but decided to go on making it. But in this he made yet another most amusing mistake, which was the beginning of all Eugenics. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 4b0596a | Moderation is not a compromise; moderation is a passion; the passion of great judges. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 369d051 | The modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration; and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took his own ethics as self-evident and enforced them; such as decency or the error of the Adamite heresy. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody else, Moslem or Christian, taking his ethics as self-evident and enforcing them; such as rever.. | medieval morality philosophy religion st-francis toleration | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 3a97eeb | When he thought of a joke he made it, and was called brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that this was no time for trifling, and was called able. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 3c54736 | You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lame.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 999e972 | G. K. Chesterton: "When Man ceases to worship God he does not worship nothing but worships everything." | Pope Francis | ||
| 042049d | But let the colours you lay on be violent, gorgeous, terrific colours, because my feelings are like that. | the-coloured-lands | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 54d3e08 | Man can hardly be defined, after the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becomin.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 02227a7 | The whole imaginative effort of Walt Whitman was really an effort to absorb and animate these multitudinous modern repetitions; and Walt Whitman would be quite capable of including in his lyric litany of optimism a list of the nine hundred and ninety-nine identical bathrooms. | G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton | ||
| dcd290e | I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it. | creativity gratitude humility wonder | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 95609e1 | Where does a wise man hide a pebble?" And the tall man answered in a low voice: "On the beach." The small man nodded, and after a short silence said: "Where does a wise man hide a leaf?" And the other answered: "In the forest." | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| eb83322 | If a man is genuinely superior to his fellows the first thing that he believes in is the equality of man. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 2278918 | If man be solely a body, its loss indeed ends his identity. But if prophets down the millenniums spake with truth, man is essentially a soul, incorporeal and omnipresent. | Paramahansa Yogananda | ||
| d58f7c0 | I was waiting for you," said Gregory. "Might I have a moment's conversation?" "Certainly. About what?" asked Syme in a sort of weak wonder. Gregory struck out with his stick at the lamp-post, and then at the tree. "About this and this," he cried; "about order and anarchy. There is your precious order, that lean, iron lamp, ugly and barren; and there is anarchy, rich, living, reproducing itself--there is anarchy, splendid in green and gold.".. | life light order | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 93adf78 | Millions of women rose up, said G. K. Chesterton, to declare that they would no longer be dictated to, and promptly became stenographers. | Anthony Esolen | ||
| a069f2e | We might even say that the one thing which separates a saint from ordinary men is his readiness to be one with ordinary men. In this sense the word ordinary must be understood in its native and noble meaning; which is connected with the word order. | saints the-dumb-ox thomasaquinas | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 81013e7 | Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest has failed. | silence superstition | G.K. Chesterton | |
| f83fd00 | Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else. | desire kantian limitation | G.K. Chesterton | |
| b6075b3 | And an even stronger example of Mr. Wells's indifference to the human psychology can be found in his cosmopolitanism, the abolition in his Utopia of all patriotic boundaries. He says in his innocent way that Utopia must be a world-state, or else people might make war on it. It does not seem to occur to him that, for a good many of us, if it were a world-state we should still make war on it to the end of the world. For if we admit that there.. | difference separation trinity utopia war | G.K. Chesterton | |
| efede2b | And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 1fb7be5 | I merely declare my independence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe; and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because they have been used. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| e473e66 | The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; whi.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 9ff867c | The dreadful joy Thy Son has sent Is heavier than any care; | christianity forgiveness jesus the-cross | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 4d211f9 | The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 22b02c8 | The past is not what it was. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 4440c1a | There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 301acaf | Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 02fa5ab | Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 0d806f9 | We have to touch such men, not with a bargepole, but with a benediction," he said. "We have to say the word that will save them from hell. We alone are left to deliver them from despair when your human charity deserts them. Go on your own primrose path pardoning all your favourite vices and being generous to your fashionable crimes; and leave us in the darkness, vampires of the night, to console those who really need consolation; who do thi.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| bae925b | Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while he is talking. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| c278f3d | In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was quite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in crowds down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high post in the State. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 3ac4ce8 | Whenever he gives advice it is always something as startling as an epigram, and yet as practical as the Bank of England. | wisdom | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 34cf07b | But it's my reading of human nature that a man will cheat in his trade, but not in his hobby. | G.K. Chesterton |