G.K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 8

Literature is a luxury fiction is a necessity.
G.K. Chesterton
Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.
G.K. Chesterton
While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.
G.K. Chesterton
The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statues, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the government will really help it to persecute its heretics…I am not frightened of the word ‘persecution’…It is a term of legal fact. If it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof—then our priests are not now persecuting, but our doctors are.
G.K. Chesterton
All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.
G.K. Chesterton
Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.
G.K. Chesterton
Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.
G.K. Chesterton
While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.
G.K. Chesterton
The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statues, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the government will really help it to persecute its heretics…I am not frightened of the word ‘persecution’…It is a term of legal fact. If it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof—then our priests are not now persecuting, but our doctors are.
G.K. Chesterton
All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.
G.K. Chesterton
Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.
G.K. Chesterton
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
G.K. Chesterton
Obciously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself.
G.K. Chesterton
But though I might fill the world with dragons I never had the slighest real doubt that heroes ought to fight with dragons. I must stop to challenge many child-lovers for cruelty to children. It is quite false to say that the child dislikes the fable because it is moral. Very often he likes the moral more than the fable. Adults are reading their own weary mockery into a mind still vigorous enough to be entirely serious.
G.K. Chesterton
It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal..The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life.
G.K. Chesterton
As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.
G.K. Chesterton
That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.
G.K. Chesterton
No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
G.K. Chesterton
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
G.K. Chesterton
Saint-worship is not the same as hero-worship; it is a much less dangerous thing than hero-worship. For hero-worship generally means the absorption or transmutation of some part, at any rate, of one's own original ideas of goodness under the heat and hypnotism of some strong personality. But saint-worship, especially when it is a worship of saints whom we know little or nothing about, is simply the worship of that tradition of goodness in which the saint's name has been embalmed; and into that empty mould our own natural idealism can much more easily be poured.
G.K. Chesterton
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.
G.K. Chesterton
The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.
G.K. Chesterton
A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.
G.K. Chesterton
I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.
G.K. Chesterton
According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.
G.K. Chesterton
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
G.K. Chesterton
Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.
G.K. Chesterton
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
G.K. Chesterton
Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.
G.K. Chesterton
[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.
G.K. Chesterton
In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
G.K. Chesterton
As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.
G.K. Chesterton
Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.
G.K. Chesterton
I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,' answered Father Brown. 'The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.
G.K. Chesterton
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
G.K. Chesterton
They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.
G.K. Chesterton
An artist is identical with an anarchist,' he cried. 'You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.''So it is,' said Mr. Syme.'Nonsense!' said Gregory, who was very rational when any one else attempted paradox.
G.K. Chesterton
Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.
G.K. Chesterton
..."vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture.
G.K. Chesterton
The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.
G.K. Chesterton
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
G.K. Chesterton
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.
G.K. Chesterton
A Second Childhood.”When all my days are endingAnd I have no song to sing,I think that I shall not be too oldTo stare at everything;As I stared once at a nursery doorOr a tall tree and a swing.Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangsOn all my sins and me,Because He does not take awayThe terror from the treeAnd stones still shine along the roadThat are and cannot be.Men grow too old for love, my love,Men grow too old for wine,But I shall not grow too old to seeUnearthly daylight shine,Changing my chamber’s dust to snowTill I doubt if it be mine.Behold, the crowning mercies melt,The first surprises stay;And in my dross is dropped a giftFor which I dare not pray:That a man grow used to grief and joyBut not to night and day.Men grow too old for love, my love,Men grow too old for lies;But I shall not grow too old to seeEnormous night arise,A cloud that is larger than the worldAnd a monster made of eyes.Nor am I worthy to unlooseThe latchet of my shoe;Or shake the dust from off my feetOr the staff that bears me throughOn ground that is too good to last,Too solid to be true.Men grow too old to woo, my love,Men grow too old to wed;But I shall not grow too old to seeHung crazily overheadIncredible rafters when I wakeAnd I find that I am not dead.A thrill of thunder in my hair:Though blackening clouds be plain,Still I am stung and startledBy the first drop of the rain:Romance and pride and passion passAnd these are what remain.Strange crawling carpets of the grass,Wide windows of the sky;So in this perilous grace of GodWith all my sins go I:And things grow new though I grow old,Though I grow old and die.
G.K. Chesterton
The man who kills a man kills a man.The man who kills himself kills all men.As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.
G.K. Chesterton
It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged; God has kept that good wine until not. It is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst.
G.K. Chesterton
There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less
G.K. Chesterton
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
G.K. Chesterton
Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
G.K. Chesterton
Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.
G.K. Chesterton
Unhappy! of course you'll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn't be unhappy, like the mother that bore you?
G.K. Chesterton
Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.
G.K. Chesterton
There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
G.K. Chesterton
I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller
G.K. Chesterton
There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism -- self-denial.
G.K. Chesterton
The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.
G.K. Chesterton
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
G.K. Chesterton
For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.
G.K. Chesterton
We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.
G.K. Chesterton
I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.
G.K. Chesterton
The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.
G.K. Chesterton