1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
4236
4237
4238
4239
4240
5443
5619
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 2857656 | Christianity was beauty created by controlling a million monsters of ugliness . . . modern art and science practically mean having the million monsters and being unable to control them... | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| aaa1319 | Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 5ce3a0b | The modern man says, "Let us leave all these arbitrary standards and embrace liberty." This is, logically rendered, "Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it." | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 4926845 | central Christian theology (sufficiently summarized in the Apostles' Creed) is the best root of energy and sound ethics. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 803b3b7 | I had thought of calling the next sort of superficial people the Idealists; but I think this implies a humility towards impersonal good they hardly show; so I call them the Autocrats. They are those who give us generally to understand that every modern reform will "work" all right, because they will be there to see. Where they will be, and for how long, they do not explain very clearly. I do not mind their looking forward to numberless live.. | G. K. Chesterton | ||
| dd7a6d6 | But trivial as are the topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at something that he has never seen: that is, never realised. He could not write an essay on such a post or wall: he does not know what the post or wa.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| c1892ef | In waking to the strangeness of the world, many of us become strangers in our own homes. But home is where we start and where we shall someday return. The path between has been marked out for us by a Savior who became the prodigal from heaven, journeying into the far country to bring us home with Him. He is both the end of our exploring and its liberating transformation. It is Jesus who has already profaned the mysteries of God by making th.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 2eccd08 | Was not everything, after all, like this bewildering woodland, this dance of dark and light? Everything only a glimpse, the glimpse always unforeseen, and always forgotten. For Gabriel Syme had found in the heart of that sun-splashed wood what many modern painters had found there. He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 63ef6a0 | I am the man who knows too much to know anything, or, at any rate, to do anything, | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 018fc7e | I say decisively that nothing is so marked in modern writing as the prediction of such ideals in the future combined with the ignoring of them in the past. Anyone | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| bf49c9c | What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| e5c6374 | when we belong to the Church we belong to something which is outside all of us; which is outside everything you talk about, outside the Cardinals and the Pope. They belong to it, but it does not belong to them. If we all fell dead suddenly, the Church would still somehow exist in God. Confound it all, don't you see that I am more sure of its existence than I am of my own existence? | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 7d1e54c | The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already sovered with scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulant as humanity. | future past tradition | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 3e0c044 | And when he became conscious of a human figure dark against the silver stream, sitting on a large boulder and looking rather like a large bird, it was perhaps with some of the premonitions proper to a man who meets the strangest friendship of his life. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 0d07773 | One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from it. | nature obstacles running-away skeletons | G.K. Chesterton | |
| cd178ab | I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| c0ea337 | The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain and tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him; the glow of the seabather comes after the icy shok of the sea bath. | pleasure | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 35f210e | Revolutionists amke a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform the reform, which is often very much wanted. | reform revolutionist | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 8385b65 | We want the will of the people, not the votes of the people; and to give a man a vote against his will is to make voting more important than the democracy it declares. | voting | G.K. Chesterton | |
| c822e3e | But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 818fd60 | For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy. G. K. CHESTERTON | Jon Krakauer | ||
| 5f4a1d9 | It is no good to tell an atheist that he is an atheist; or to charge a denier of immortality with the infamy of denying it; or to imagine that one can force an opponent to admit he is wrong, by proving that he is wrong on somebody else's principles, but not on his own. After the great example of St. Thomas, the principle stands, or ought always to have stood established; that we must either not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on h.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 66470bd | Let us begin, then, with the mad-house; from this evil and fantastic inn let us set forth on our intellectual journey. Now, if we are to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake. There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable; and gen.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 71360ed | Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| adeb14a | The poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt." "There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick." | rebellion | G.K. Chesterton | |
| e3fd2c3 | The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. But the Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god b.. | moon moonlight mysticism religion sun transcendentalism | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 7fc7944 | G. K. Chesterton wrote in Charles Dickens, that The Pickwick Papers was neither a good novel nor a bad novel but in fact 'not a novel at all.' He believed it was "something nobler than a novel". Certainly it was never conceived as a novel but merely as the letterpress to accompany the "cockney sporting plates". Unfortunately Robert Seymour committed suicide after the first two instalments so the third one was undertaken by Robert Buss whose.. | Charles Dickens | ||
| 8226dc8 | He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a Lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| b1cca25 | Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 4eb1804 | There is a limit to human charity," said Lady Outram, trembling all over. "There is," said Father Brown dryly, "and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity. You must forgive me if I was not altogether crushed by your contempt for my uncharitableness today; or by the lectures you read me about pardon for every sinner. For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only.. | crime forgiveness | G.K. Chesterton | |
| b3b5d4f | Contrary to popular belief, fantasy is not about making things up. The world is stuffed full of things. It is almost impossible to invent any more. No, the role of fantasy as defined by G. K. Chesterton is to take what is normal and everyday and usual and unregarded, and turn it around and show it to the audience from a different direction, so that they look at it once again with new eyes. | Terry Pratchett | ||
| 3ec9035 | The sceptics, like bees, give their one sting and die. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 19e3771 | Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself.".. | G. K. Chesterton | ||
| 746c3a7 | Every man is dangerous," said the old man without moving, "who cares only for one thing." | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 3a980f6 | Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung; The world was very old indeed. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 2346be9 | Each thing that obeys law [has] the glory and isolation of the anarchist. | submission | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 9000597 | The great man will come when all of us are feeling great, not when all of us are feeling small. He will ride in at some splendid moment when we all feel that we could do without him. "We are then able to answer in some manner the question, "Why have we no great men?" We have no great men chiefly because we are always looking for them. We are connoisseurs of greatness, and connoisseurs can never be great; we are fastidious, that is, we are s.. | inspirational leadership | G.K. Chesterton | |
| f7e2c75 | All previous ages have sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realize what is really the right life, what was really the good man. A definite part of the modern world has come beyond question to the conclusion that there is no answer to these questions, that the most that we can do is to set up a few notice-boards at places of obvious danger, to warn men, for instance, against drinking themselves to death, or ignoring the mere existenc.. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 4932037 | You say you are a poet of law; I saw you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden. | poetry | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 58f7fd2 | We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not .. | art ecstasy forgotten | G.K. Chesterton | |
| 9c254ab | So the mythological imagination moves as it were in circles, hovering either to find a place or to return to it. In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity in the idea of seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and mysterious levity about all the places found. | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| 82dae5b | You attacked reason," said Father Brown. "It's bad theology." | G.K. Chesterton | ||
| e696c06 | To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.' G. K. Chesterton | James Runcie | ||
| d85e3fe | Men in England are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by brutes who refuse them bread, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern, and therefore wish to enslave. | G.K. Chesterton |