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G. K. Chesterton

English author and Christian apologist (1874–1936)
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was a British writer whose prolific and diverse output included works of philosophy, ontology, poetry, play writing, journalism, public lecturing and debating, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics (particularly for Catholicism), and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction. He has been called the "prince of paradox".

When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.
There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
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 old childlike faith in practical politics.
See also:
The Defendant (1901)
Heretics (1905)
Orthodoxy (1908)
The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
What's Wrong with the World (1910)
The Ballad of the White Horse (1911)
The Everlasting Man (1925)

Quotes

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Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.
 
There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.
 
The centre of every man's existence is a dream.
 
The philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, but its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres.
 
Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
 
Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.
  • Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.
  • Art is the signature of man.
  • When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. 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 old childlike faith in practical politics.
  • The journalists would appear to be in an almost literal sense the priests of the modern world. They may not rise precisely to the tremendous responsibility which was laid upon Peter, but at least it can be said that whatever they bind on earth is bound on earth, and whatever they loose on earth is loosed on earth. They have essentially and absolutely the same functions that were employed by the old priests, but their power for deceit is even greater and their responsibility to the world even less. A comparison between the priests and the journalists would be striking in many points. [...] The priest's influence and power consisted almost entirely in the fact that he was the only man who brought news. [...] the corruption of the priesthood occurred at the precise moment in which it changed from a minority organised to impart knowledge into a minority organised to withhold it. The great danger of decadence in journalism is almost exactly the same. Journalism possesses in itself the potentiality of becoming one of the most frightful monstrosities and delusions that have ever cursed mankind. This horrible transformation will occur at the exact instant at which journalists realise that they can become an aristocracy.
    • "The New Priests" (1901) [1]
  • One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.
    • Robert Browning. (1903)
  • The truth is that Tolstoy, with his immense genius, with his colossal faith, with his vast fearlessness and vast knowledge of life, is deficient in one faculty and one faculty alone. He is not a mystic; and therefore he has a tendency to go mad. Men talk of the extravagances and frenzies that have been produced by mysticism; they are a mere drop in the bucket. In the main, and from the beginning of time, mysticism has kept men sane. The thing that has driven them mad was logic. ...The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism — the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem.
    • Tolstoy (1903)
  • Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.
    • Twelve Types (1903) Charles II
  • The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.
    • Twelve Types (1903) "Sir Walter Scott"
  • The simplification of anything is always sensational.
    • Varied Types (1903)
  • There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.
  • Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.
    • Daily News (18 February 1905)
  • Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
    • Daily News (25 February 1905)
  • The riddle of life is simply this. For some mad reason in this mad world of ours, the things which men differ about most are exactly the things about which they must be got to agree. Men can agree on the fact that the earth goes round the sun. But then it does not matter a dump whether the earth goes around the sun or the Pleiades. But men cannot agree about morals: sex, property, individual rights, fixity and contracts, patriotism, suicide, public habits of health – these are exactly the things that men tend to fight about. And these are exactly the things that must be settled somehow on strict principles. Study each of them, and you will find each of them works back certainly to a philosophy, probably to a religion.
    • According to Larry Azar (Evolution and Other Fairy Tales, AuthorHouse, 2005, p. 470), Chesterton made this statement on 16 March 1907
  • When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself.
    • The Illustrated London News (14 December 1907)
  • The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
    • "The Book of Job: An introduction" (1907)
  • When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any.
    • The Illustrated London News (7 November 1908)
 
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
  • Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
    • Illustrated London News (23 October 1909)
  • The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
    • Illustrated London News (16 July 1910)
  • I think that if they gave me leave, Within the world to stand, I would be good through all the day I spent in fairyland. They should not hear a word from me, Of selfishness or scorn, If only I could find the door, If only I were born.
    • By the Babe Unborn poem, Delphi Works of G. K. Chesterton (Illustrated)[1]
  • Neither reason nor faith will ever die; for men would die if deprived of either. The wildest mystic uses his reason at some stage; if it be only by reasoning against reason. The most incisive sceptic has dogmas of his own; though when he is a very incisive sceptic, he has often forgotten what they are. Faith and reason are in this sense co-eternal; but as the words are popularly used, as loose labels for particular periods, the one is now almost as remote as the other. What was called the Age of Reason has vanished as completely as what are called the Ages of Faith.
  • The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child.
    • Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens Chapter III "Pickwick Papers" (1911)
  • Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.
    • Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens Chapter VI "Old Curiosity Shop" (1911)
  • Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
    • A Miscellany of Men (1912)
  • To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
    • A Short History of England (1917)
  • All government is an ugly necessity.
    • A Short History of England (1917)
  • I do not, in my private capacity, believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb; nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking his soul, and denying its dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
  • A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.
    • A Utopia of Usurers (1917)
  • There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the emptiness of its own theology. [...] A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments ; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world ; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests ; and yet this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there is only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets.
  • When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.
    • Illustrated London News (6 April 1918)
  • Prince, Bayard would have smashed his sword
    To see the sort of knights you dub--
    Is that the last of them — O Lord
    Will someone take me to a pub?
  • A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.
    • "William Blake" (1920)
  • Christendom might quite reasonably have been alarmed if it had not been attacked. But as a matter of history it had been attacked. The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting the Moslem even if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger; but as a matter of history he was already an old enemy. The critic of the Crusade talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Thibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded. They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris. They seem to forget that if the Crusaders nearly conquered Palestine, it was but a return upon the Moslems who had nearly conquered Europe.
    • The Meaning of The Crusade. (1920)
  • It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
 
There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world...
  • There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.
    • Child Psychology and Nonsense (15 October 1921)
  • I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
    • Illustrated London News (29 April 1922)
    • Collected in Generally Speaking (PDF) (1929), "XX. On Holland", p. 131.
 
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
  • I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.
    • Illustrated London News (3 June 1922)
  • Atheism is, I suppose, the supreme example of a simple faith. The man says there is no God; if he really says it in his heart, he is a certain sort of man so designated in Scripture [i. e. a fool, Ps 53:2]. But, anyhow, when he has said it, he has said it; and there seems to be no more to be said. The conversation seems likely to languish. The truth is that the atmosphere of excitement, by which the atheist lived, was an atmosphere of thrilled and shuddering theism, and not of atheism at all; it was an atmosphere of defiance and not of denial. Irreverence is a very servile parasite of reverence; and has starved with its starving lord. After this first fuss about the merely aesthetic effect of blasphemy, the whole thing vanishes into its own void. If there were not God, there would be no atheists.
    • Where All Roads Lead (1922); this is often misquoted as "If there were no God, there would be no atheists."
  • The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.
    • Illustrated London News (1924)
  • These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.
    • Illustrated London News (11 August 1928)
  • Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
    • Illustrated London News (19 April 1930)
  • A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
    • As quoted in an interview in The New York Times (21 November 1930)
  • There is something to be said for every error; but, whatever may be said for it, the most important thing to be said about it is that it is erroneous.
    • The Illustrated London News (25 April 1931)
  • 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.
    • "Holding on to Romanticism" in The Illustrated London News (2 May 1931)
  • What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.
    • "On Bright Old Things — and Other Things" in Sidelights on New London and Newer New York : And Other Essays (1932)
  • Plato was right, but not quite right.
    • The Dumb Ox (1934)
  • The Church never said that wrongs could not or should not be righted; or that commonwealths could not or should not be made happier; or that it was not worth while to help them in secular and material things; or that it is not a good thing if manners become milder, or comforts more common, or cruelties more rare. But she did say that we must not count on the certainty even of comforts becoming more common or cruelties more rare; as if this were an inevitable social trend towards a sinless humanity; instead of being as it was a mood of man, and perhaps a better mood, possibly to be followed by a worse one. We must not hate humanity, or despise humanity, or refuse to help humanity; but we must not trust humanity; in the sense of trusting a trend in human nature which cannot turn back to bad things.
    • "My Six Conversions, § II : When the World Turned Back" in The Wells and the Shallows (1935)
  • Sometime ago I went with some children to see Maeterlinck's fine and delicate fairy play about the Blue Bird that brought everybody happiness. For some reason or other it did not bring me happiness, and even the children were not quite happy. I will not go so far as to say that the Blue Bird was a Blue Devil, but it left us in something seriously like the blues. The children were party dissatisfied with it because it did not end with a Day of Judgment; because it was never revealed to the hero and heroine that the dog had been faithful and the cat faithless. For children are innocent and love justice; while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
    • "On Household Gods and Goblins" (1922)
  • A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame and money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.
    • As quoted in Mackay's The Harvest of a Quiet Eye, A Selection of Scientific Quotations (1977), p. 34
 
The poor object to being governed badly, while the rich object to being governed at all.
  • Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
    • As quoted in "The Sleep of Trees" (1980) by Jane Yolen, in Tales of Wonder (1983) by Jane Yolen, p. 33
  • Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
    • Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton : The Illustrated London News, 1905-1907 (1986), p. 71
  • A modern man may disapprove of some of his sweeping reforms, and approve others; but finds it difficult not to admire even where he does not approve.
    • Said of Benito Mussolini while comparing him to Hildebrand (i. e. Pope Gregory VII), as quoted in "The Pearl of Great Price" by Robert Royal, his Introduction to "The Resurrection of Rome" by G. K. Chesterton in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (1990) by Vol. XXI, p. 274
  • I've searched all the parks in all the cities — and found no statues of Committees.
    • As quoted in Trust Or Consequences : Build Trust Today Or Lose Your Market Tomorrow (2004) by Al Golin, p. 206; also in Storms of Life (2008) by Dr. Don Givens, p. 136
  • The poor object to being governed badly, while the rich object to being governed at all.
    • As quoted in Grace at the Table : Ending Hunger in God's World (1999) by David M. Beckmann abd Arthur R. Simon, p. 156
  • And I will add this point of merely personal experience of humanity: when men have a real explanation they explain it, eagerly and copiously and in common speech, as Huxley freely gave it when he thought he had it. When they have no explanation to offer, they give short dignified replies, disdainful of the ignorance of the multitude.
    • "Doubts About Darwinism", in The Illustrated London News (17 July 1920)
  • Fine weather encourages individualism. When the whole glittering landscape is cut out as clear as a map—indented by the blue sky as by a blue sea, then each one of us wishes to take his own way, to walk by himself along the roads of the world and conquer for himself the cities of the morning. In the sunlight a man asks for liberty, which is only the divine name for loneliness. But it is in black and bleak conditions that we learn that it is not well for man to be alone; and festivity was discovered in the darkness. Winter encourages that thing called comradeship which modern humanitarians so often seem unable to understand, but which Walt Whitman so wisely perceived to be the permanent foundation of democracy.
    • Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton : The Illustrated London News, 1905-1907 (1986), p. 190
  • The object of a ceremony is not to be beautiful, though that is a valuable element. The object of a ceremony is to be ceremonious. Ritual is a need of the human soul — nay, it is rather a need of the human body, like exercise. A man does not take off his hat to a lady because he looks nicer without it; the instance of bald men would be alone sufficient to upset such an explanation. He does it because you must positively do something when you meet a lady, or your whole civilisation goes to pieces; and taking off your hat is easier than taking off your necktie or lying face downwards on the pavement.
    • Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton : The Illustrated London News, 1905-1907 (1986), p. 191
  • For the secular society of to-day is sceptical not merely about spiritual assumptions, but about its own secular assumptions. It has not merely broken the church window or besieged the tower of tradition; it has also kicked away the ladder of progress by which it had climbed. The Declaration of Independence, once the charter of democracy, begins by saying that certain things are self-evident. If we were to trace the history of the American mind from Thomas Jefferson to William James, we should find that fewer and fewer things were self-evident, until at last hardly anything is self-evident. So far from it being self-evident to the modern that men are created equal, it is not self-evident that men are created, or even that men are men. They are sometimes supposed to be monkeys muddling through a transition stage before the Superman. But there is not only doubt about mystical things; not even only about moral things. There is most doubt of all about rational things. I do not mean that I feel these doubts, either rational or mystical; but I mean that a sufficient number of modern people feel them to make unanimity an absurd assumption. Reason was self-evident before Pragmatism. Mathematics were self-evident before Einstein. But this scepticism is throwing thousands into a condition of doubt, not about occult but about obvious things. We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.
    • The Illustrated London News (14 August 1926)

The Defendant (1901)

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A collection of essays previously published in The Speaker and The Daily News.
 
The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons of God.
  • The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.
    • "In Defence Of A New Edition" - Preface to the second edition (1902)
  • In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation — it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry.
    • "Introduction"
  • There runs a strange law through the length of human history — that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.
    This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself. This is the real fall of Adam, and it is a spiritual fall. It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.
    • "Introduction"
  • The pessimist is commonly spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not. Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican. The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons of God.
    • "Introduction"
  • Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing its goodness.
    • "Introduction"
  • 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 middle of one's back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad civilization is a good civilization not good enough for us. We choose to call the great mass of the history of mankind bad, not because it is bad, but because we are better. This is palpably an unfair principle. Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.
    • "Introduction"
  • Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder by which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress should be something else besides a continual parricide; therefore I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea.
    • "Introduction"
 
Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are — of immeasurable stature.
  • The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed that they have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes.
    • "A Defence of Humilities"
  • We all know that the 'divine glory of the ego' is socially a great nuisance; we all do actually value our friends for modesty, freshness, and simplicity of heart. Whatever may be the reason, we all do warmly respect humility — in other people.
    • "A Defence of Humilities"
 
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
  • It is always the secure who are humble.
    • "A Defence of Humilities"
  • A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man — the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle.
    • "A Defence of Humilities"
  • Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are — of immeasurable stature. That the trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our own foot-rules and our own stature. But to the spirit which has stripped off for a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlasting forest, with dragons for denizens; the stones of the road are as incredible mountains piled one upon the other; the dandelions are like gigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around; and the heath-bells on their stalks are like planets hung in heaven each higher than the other.
    • "A Defence of Humilities"
  • There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorn says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.
    • "A Defence of Heraldry"
  • The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.
    • "A Defence of Slang"
 
If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse.
  • The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark these human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.
    • "A Defence of Baby-Worship"
 
The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong.
  • There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religion teaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understand the common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, we have the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This is the great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, and which will support it to the end
    • "A Defence of Baby-Worship"
  • The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect.
    • "A Defence of Baby-Worship"
 
The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together.
  • When we reverence anything in the mature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easy matter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children.
    We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception of things if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, with precisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat the infantile limitations.
    • A Defence of Baby-Worship
  • The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.
    • "A Defence of Baby-Worship"
  • The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.
    • "A Defence of Baby-Worship"
  • 'My country, right or wrong' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying, except in a desperate case. It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober'.
    • "A Defence of Patriotism"

The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

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Human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable.
  • The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called “Keep to-morrow dark,” and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) “Cheat the Prophet.” The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.
    For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable.
    • Opening lines
  • Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?
    • Book I, Chapter II: "The Man in Green"
  • Don't you believe people when they tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in miracles because they were ignorant. They did it because they were wise, filthily, vilely wise—too wise to eat or sleep or put on their boots with patience.
    • Book III, Chapter III: "The Experiment of Mr. Buck"
  • Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!
    • Book V, Chapter I: "The Empire of Notting Hill"

The Club of Queer Trades (1905)

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  • "Bosh," he said, "On what else is the whole world run but immediate impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, but its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres."
    • Ch. 2 "The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation"
  • Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction ... for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.
    • Ch. 4 "Speculation of the House Agent"

Heretics (1905)

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  • There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
  • It is amusing to think how much conservative ingenuity has been wasted in the defence of the House of Lords by men who were desperately endeavouring to prove that the House of Lords consisted of clever men. There is one really good defence of the House of Lords [...] and that is, that the House of Lords, in its full and proper strength, consists of stupid men. It really would be a plausible defence of that otherwise indefensible body to point out that the clever men in the Commons, who owed their power to cleverness, ought in the last resort to be checked by the average man in the Lords, who owed their power to accident.

Charles Dickens (1906)

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The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact.
  • Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other things, arises merely from this: that we confuse the word "indefinable" with the word "vague." If some one speaks of a spiritual fact as "indefinable" we promptly picture something misty, a cloud with indeterminate edges. But this is an error even in commonplace logic. The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact. It is our arms and legs, our pots and pans, that are indefinable. The indefinable is the indisputable. The man next door is indefinable, because he is too actual to be defined. And there are some to whom spiritual things have the same fierce and practical proximity; some to whom God is too actual to be defined.
    • Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"
  • Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means.
    • Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"
  • One of the actual and certain consequences of the idea that all men are equal is immediately to produce very great men.
    • Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"
  • There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
    • Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"
  • For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the King.... It has often been said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.
    • Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"
  • 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 small. When Diogenes went about with a lantern looking for an honest man, I am afraid he had very little time to be honest himself. And when anybody goes about on his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that one man at any rate shall not be great.
    • Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"
  • No man encouraged his characters so much as Dickens. "I am an affectionate father," he says, "to every child of my fancy." He was not only an affectionate father, he was an overindulgent father. The children of his fancy are spoilt children. They shake the house like heavy and shouting schoolboys; they smash the story to pieces like so much furniture.
    • Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"
  • 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.
    • Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"
  • Dickens had all his life the faults of the little boy who is kept up too late at night. The boy in such a case exhibits a psychological paradox; he is a little too irritable because he is a little too happy. Dickens was always a little too irritable because he was a little too happy. Lie the over-wrought child in society, he was splendidly sociable, and yet suddenly quarrelsome.
    • Ch 2 : "The Boyhood of Dickens"
  • As a fact, there is no shred of evidence to show that those who have had sad experiences tend to have a sad philosophy. There are numberless points upon which Dickens is spiritually at one with the poor, that is, with the great mass of mankind. But there is no point in which he is more perfectly at one with them than in showing that there is no kind of connection between a man being unhappy and a man being pessimistic. Sorrow and pessimism are indeed, in a sense, opposite things, since sorrow is founded on the value of something, and pessimism upon the value of nothing.
    • Ch 2 : "The Boyhood of Dickens"
  • The pessimists are aristocrats like Byron; the men who curse God are aristocrats like Swinburne. But when those who starve and suffer speak for a moment, they do not profess merely an optimism, they profess a cheap optimism; they are too poor to afford a dear one. They cannot indulge in any detailed or merely logical defence of life; that would be to delay the enjoyment of it. These higher optimists, of whom Dickens was one, do not approve of the universe; they do not even admire the universe; they fall in love with it. They embrace life too close to criticize or even to see it. Existence to such men has the wild beauty of a woman, and those love her with most intensity who love her with least cause.
    • Ch 2 : "The Boyhood of Dickens"
  • [Dickens] was the character whom anybody can hurt and nobody can kill.
    • Ch 3 : "The Youth of Dickens"
  • Round the birth of "Pickwick" broke one of those literary quarrels that were too common in the life of Dickens.... He turned people into mortal enemies whom he might have turned very easily into immortal jokes.
    • Ch 4 : "The Pickwick Papers"
  • Fiction means the common things as seen by the uncommon people. Fairy tales mean the uncommon things as seen by the common people.
    • Ch 4 : "The Pickwick Papers"
  • It is the custom in our little epoch to sneer at the middle classes. Cockney artists profess to find the bourgeoisie dull; as if artists had any business to find anything dull. Decadents talk contemptuously of its conventions and its set tasks; it never occurs to them that conventions and set tasks are the very way to keep that greenness in the grass and that redness in the roses--which they have lost forever.
    • Ch 4 : "The Pickwick Papers"
  • The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain kind of literature and likes that kind of literature even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good.
    • Ch 5 : "The Great Popularity"
  • Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the community. For this kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted.
    • Ch 5 : "The Great Popularity"
  • America has a new delicacy, a coarse, rank refinement.
    • Ch. 6 "Dickens and America"
  • A sober man may become a drunkard through being a coward. A brave man may become a coward through being a drunkard.
    • Ch. 8 "The Time of Transition"
  • When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.
    • Ch. 10 "The Great Dickens Characters"
  • A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.
    • Ch. 10 "The Great Dickens Characters"

All Things Considered (1908)

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Full text online at Wikisource
  • I cannot understand the people who take literature seriously; but I can love them, and I do. Out of my love I warn them to keep clear of this book. It is a collection of crude and shapeless papers upon current or rather flying subjects; and they must be published pretty much as they stand. They were written, as a rule, at the last moment; they were handed in the moment before it was too late, and I do not think that our commonwealth would have been shaken to its foundations if they had been handed in the moment after. They must go out now, with all their imperfections on their head, or rather on mine; for their vices are too vital to be improved with a blue pencil, or with anything I can think of, except dynamite.
    Their chief vice is that so many of them are very serious; because I had no time to make them flippant. It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous.
  • It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite. ... The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or particularly "in the know." To flaunt the fact that we have had all the last books from Germany is simply vulgar; like flaunting the fact that we have had all the last bonnets from Paris. To introduce into philosophical discussions a sneer at a creed's antiquity is like introducing a sneer at a lady's age. It is caddish because it is irrelevant. The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.
    • "The Case for the Ephemeral"
  • An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.
  • Anomalies do matter very much, and do a great deal of harm; abstract illogicalities do matter a great deal, and do a great deal of harm. And this for a reason that any one at all acquainted with human nature can see for himself. All injustice begins in the mind. And anomalies accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth. Suppose I had by some prehistoric law the power of forcing every man in Battersea to nod his head three times before he got out of bed. The practical politicians might say that this power was a harmless anomaly; that it was not a grievance. It could do my subjects no harm; it could do me no good. The people of Battersea, they would say, might safely submit to it. But the people of Battersea could not safely submit to it, for all that. If I had nodded their heads for them for fifty years I could cut off their heads for them at the end of it with immeasurably greater ease. For there would have permanently sunk into every man's mind the notion that it was a natural thing for me to have a fantastic and irrational power. They would have grown accustomed to insanity.
  • For my part, I should be inclined to suggest that the chief object of education should be to restore simplicity. If you like to put it so, the chief object of education is not to learn things; nay, the chief object of education is to unlearn things.
  • It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke — that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls.
  • For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers. The speeches in our time are more careful and elaborate, because they are meant to be read, and not to be heard. And exactly because they are more careful and elaborate, they are not so likely to be worthy of a careful and elaborate report. They are not interesting enough. So the moral cowardice of modern politicians has, after all, some punishment attached to it by the silent anger of heaven. Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.
  • It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. No one sees anything funny in a tree falling down. No one sees a delicate absurdity in a stone falling down. No man stops in the road and roars with laughter at the sight of the snow coming down. The fall of thunderbolts is treated with some gravity. The fall of roofs and high buildings is taken seriously. It is only when a man tumbles down that we laugh. Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
  • It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
    • "Spiritualism"

George Bernard Shaw (1909)

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  • A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.
    • "The Problem of a Preface"
  • Ireland is a country in which the political conflicts are at least genuine; they are about something. They are about patriotism, about religion, or about money: the three great realities. In other words, they are concerned with what commonwealth a man lives in, or with what universe a man lives in, or with how he is to manage to live in either.
    • "The Irishman"
  • The Puritan is only strong enough to stiffen; the Catholic is strong enough to relax.
    • "The Critic"
  • We all know that constancy, jealousy, and the personal pledge are natural and inevitable in sex; we do not feel any surprise when we see them either in a murder or in a valentine.
  • I must frankly say that Bernard Shaw always seems to me to use the word God not only without any idea of what it means, but without one moment's thought about what it could possibly mean. He said to some atheist, "Never believe in a God that you cannot improve on." The atheist (being a sound theologian) naturally replied that one should not believe in a God whom one could improve on; as that would show that he was not God.
    • "The Philosopher"
  • For there are two types of great humorist: those who love to see a man absurd and those who hate to see him absurd. Of the first kind are Rabelais and Dickens; of the second kind are Swift and Bernard Shaw.
    • "The Philosopher"
  • Shyness is always the sign of a divided soul; a man is shy because he somehow thinks his position at once despicable and important. If he were without humility he would not care; and if he were without pride he would not care.
    • "The Philosopher"
  • We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper.
    • "The Philosopher"

Tremendous Trifles (1909)

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  • The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.
    • Ch. I: ""Tremendous Trifles"
  • For my friend said that he opened his intellect as the sun opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening's sake, opening infinitely for ever. But I said that I opened my intellect as I opened my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid. I was doing it at the moment. And as I truly pointed out, it would look uncommonly silly if I went on opening my mouth infinitely, for ever and ever.
    • Ch. V: "The Extraordinary Cabman"
  • Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.
    • Ch. X: "On Lying in Bed"
 
The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
  • Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.
    • Ch. XVII: "The Red Angel"
    • Paraphrased Variant: Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.
      • The earliest known attribution of this was an epigraph in Coraline (2004) by Neil Gaiman; when questioned on this at his official Tumblr account, Gaiman admitted to misquoting Chesterton: "It’s my fault. When I started writing Coraline, I wrote my version of the quote in Tremendous Trifles, meaning to go back later and find the actual quote, as I didn’t own the book, and this was before the Internet. And then ten years went by before I finished the book, and in the meantime I had completely forgotten that the Chesterton quote was mine and not his.
        I’m perfectly happy for anyone to attribute it to either of us. The sentiment is his, the phrasing is mine.
    • Paraphrased variant: Fairytales don’t tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairytales tell children that dragons can be killed.
  • [A]rt is limitation.[…] The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
    • Ch. XXIII: "The Toy Theatre"
  • The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
    • Ch. XXXI: "The Riddle of the Ivy"

The Ball and the Cross (1909)

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  • "I swear to you, then," said MacIan, after a pause. "I swear to you that nothing shall come between us. I swear to you that nothing shall be in my heart or in my head till our swords clash together. I swear it by the God you have denied, by the Blessed Lady you have blasphemed; I swear it by the seven swords in her heart. I swear it by the Holy Island where my fathers are, by the honour of my mother, by the secret of my people, and by the chalice of the Blood of God."
    The atheist drew up his head. "And I," he said, "give my word."
    • Part II: "The Religion of the Stipendiary Magistrate", last paragraphs
  • It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, "Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe," or "Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet." They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complex picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority.
    • Part IV: "A Discussion at Dawn", 2nd paragraph

A Song of Defeat (1910)

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Fully published in Poems (1917), but appearing in part in Sketches and Snapshots (1910) by George William Russell
 
Our chiefs said 'Done,' and I did not deem it;
Our seers said 'Peace,' and it was not peace;
Earth will grow worse till men redeem it,
And wars more evil, ere all wars cease.
  • Our chiefs said 'Done,' and I did not deem it;
    Our seers said 'Peace,' and it was not peace;
    Earth will grow worse till men redeem it,
    And wars more evil, ere all wars cease.
  • For we that fight till the world is free,
    We are not easy in victory:
    We have known each other too long, my brother,
    And fought each other, the world and we.
  • It is all as of old, the empty clangour,
    The NOTHING scrawled on a five-foot page,
    The huckster who, mocking holy anger,
    Painfully paints his face with rage.
    ...
    We that fight till the world is free,
    We have no comfort in victory;
    We have read each other as Cain his brother,
    We know each other, these slaves and we.

Alarms and Discursions (1910)

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Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
  • Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
    • 'Cheese,' p. 70
  • But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.
    • 'The New House,' pp. 161-162

What's Wrong With The World (1910)

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  • If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
    • Folly and Female Education
  • The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
    • The Unfinished Temple

The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)

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The Complete Father Brown Series online
  • The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.
    • The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Blue Cross
  • 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.
    • The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Blue Cross
  • One of his hobbies was to wait for the American Shakespeare — a hobby more patient than angling.
    • ''The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Secret Garden
  • His head was always most valuable when he had lost it. In such moments he put two and two together and made four million.
    • The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Queer Feet
  • Silver is sometimes more valuable than gold, that is, in large quantities.
    • The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Queer Feet
  • Odd, isn't it, that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?
    • The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Queer Feet
  • 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.
    • The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Queer Feet
  • Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.
    • The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Flying Stars
  • One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.
    • The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Sins of Prince Saradine
  • Very few reputations are gained by unsullied virtue.
    • The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Sins of Prince Saradine
  • 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.
    • The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Sins of Prince Saradine
  • To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
    • The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Paradise of Thieves
  • "...If ever I murdered somebody," he added quite simply, "I dare say it might be an Optimist."
"Why?" cried Merton amused. "Do you think people dislike cheerfulness?"
"People like frequent laughter," answered Father Brown, "but I don't think they like a permanent smile. Cheerfulness without humour is a very trying thing."
  • The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) The Three Tools of Death
  • I know that journalism largely consists in saying 'Lord Jones Dead' to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
    • The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914) The Purple Wig
  • "I don’t believe in anything," answered Pendragon very briskly, with a bright eye cocked at a red tropical bird. "I'm a man of science."
    • The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914) The Perishing of the Pendragons
  • "I don't believe in anything; I'm a journalist," answered the melancholy being—“Boon, of the Daily Wire. ..."
    • The Incredulity of Father Brown (1923) The Curse of the Golden Cross
  • "No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized 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 somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat."
    • The Secret of Father Brown (1927) The Secret of Father Brown
 
If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it.
  • "If you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it."
    • The Secret of Father Brown (1927) The Song of the Flying Fish
  • "For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven."
    • The Secret of Father Brown (1927) The Chief Mourner of Marne
  • She hasn't got any intellect to speak of; but you don't need any intellect to be an intellectual.
    • The Scandal of Father Brown (1935) The Scandal of Father Brown
  • It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
    • The Scandal of Father Brown (1935) The Point of a Pin

Manalive (1912)

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  • As for science and religion, the known and admitted facts are few and plain enough. All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That's the only difference between science and religion there's ever been, or will be.
    • Michael Moon in Part II, ch. I
  • The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still.
    • Arthur Inglewood in Part II, ch. I
  • Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.
    • Michael Moon in Part II, ch. IV

Magic: A Fantastic Comedy (1913)

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  • I object to a quarrel because it always interrupts an argument.

The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)

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University of Notre Dame Press, 1963
 
The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes.
  • It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.
    • Ch I: The Victorian Compromise and Its Enemies (p. 8)
  • The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead.
    • Ch I: The Victorian Compromise and Its Enemies (p. 17)
  • A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape.
    • Ch I: The Victorian Compromise and Its Enemies (p. 20)
  • The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.
    • Ch I: The Victorian Compromise and Its Enemies (p. 24)
  • Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.
    • Ch I: The Victorian Compromise and Its Enemies (p. 43)
  • He did not know the way things were going: he was too Victorian to understand the Victorian epoch. He did not know enough ignorant people to have heard the news.
  • It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.
    • Ch. II: The Great Victorian Novelists (p. 73)
  • He was, if ever there was one, an inspired poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes.

The Flying Inn (1914)

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  • There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.
    • Ch. IX: "The Higher Criticism and Mr. Hibbs"
  • The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.
    • Ch. XV: "The Songs of the Car Club"
 
Who is for victory?
Who is for liberty?
Who goes home?
  • In the city set upon slime and loam,
    They cry in their Parliament, "Who goes home?"
    And there comes no answer in arch or dome,
    For none in the city of graves goes home.
    Yet these shall perish and understand,
    For God has pity on this great land.
  • Men that are men again: Who goes home?
    Tocsin and trumpeter! Who goes home?
    For there's blood on the grass and blood on the foam,
    And blood on the body, when Man comes home.
    And a voice valedictory: Who is for victory?
    Who is for liberty? Who goes home?
    • "Who Goes Home?", poem (by Patrick Dalroy) in Ch. XXI: "The Road to Roundabout"
  • I am not fighting a hopeless fight. People who have fought in real fights don't, as a rule.
    • Patrick Dalroy in Ch. XXIII: "The March on Ivywood"

Poems (1917)

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It is something to be wiser than the world,
It is something to be older than the sky.

The Great Minimum

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Let the thunder break on man and beast and bird
And the lightning. It is something to have been.
  • It is something to have wept as we have wept,
    It is something to have done as we have done,
    It is something to have watched when all men slept,
    And seen the stars which never see the sun.
    It is something to have smelt the mystic rose,
    Although it break and leave the thorny rods,
    It is something to have hungered once as those
    Must hunger who have ate the bread of gods.
  • To have seen you and your unforgotten face,
    Brave as a blast of trumpets for the fray,
    Pure as white lilies in a watery space,
    It were something, though you went from me today.
    To have known the things that from the weak are furled,
    Perilous ancient passions, strange and high;
    It is something to be wiser than the world,
    It is something to be older than the sky.
  • In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts,
    And fattened lives that of their sweetness tire
    In a world of flying loves and fading lusts,
    It is something to be sure of a desire.
    Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard;
    Yea, blessed are our eyes for they have seen:
    Let the thunder break on man and beast and bird
    And the lightning. It is something to have been.

Utopia of Usurers (1917)

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Full text online
 
A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art. … The first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement.
 
The big commercial concerns of to-day are quite exceptionally incompetent. They will be even more incompetent when they are omnipotent.
 
The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself.
  • A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art. ... The first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement.
    • p. 6
  • Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes—that they have done for some time past—they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers. ... I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.
    • pp. 15-17
  • Even the tyrant never rules by force alone; but mostly by fairy tales. And so it is with the modern tyrant, the great employer. The sight of a millionaire is seldom, in the ordinary sense, an enchanting sight: nevertheless, he is in his way an enchanter. As they say in the gushing articles about him in the magazines, he is a fascinating personality. So is a snake. At least he is fascinating to rabbits; and so is the millionaire to the rabbit-witted sort of people that ladies and gentlemen have allowed themselves to become.
    • p. 19
  • The big commercial concerns of to-day are quite exceptionally incompetent. They will be even more incompetent when they are omnipotent.
    • p. 23
  • Employers will give time to eat, time to sleep; they are in terror of a time to think.
    • p. 31
  • The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself.
    • pp. 33-34
  • In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really depends on some religion of inequality. The capitalist must somehow distinguish himself from human kind; he must be obviously above it—or he would be obviously below it.
    • p. 34
  • 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.
    • p. 37

The Superstition of Divorce (1920)

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  • I do not ask them to assume the worth of my creed or any creed; and I could wish they did not so often ask me to assume the worth of their worthless, poisonous plutocratic modern society. But if it could be shown, as I think it can, that a long historical view and a patient political experience can at last accumulate solid scientific evidence of the vital need of such a vow, then I can conceive no more tremendous tribute than this, to any faith, which made a flaming affirmation from the darkest beginnings, of what the latest enlightenment can only slowly discover in the end.
  • Say that a thing is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be dismissed as a superstition without examination. But preface your remark merely with "they say" or "don't you know that?" or try (and fail) to remember the name of some professor mentioned in some newspaper; and the keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say.

What I Saw in America (1922)

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There is truth in every ancient fable, and there is here even something of it in the fancy that finds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore the bolts of Jove.
Full text online
  • A foreigner is a man who laughs at everything except jokes. He is perfectly entitled to laugh at anything, so long as he realises, in a reverent and religious spirit, that he himself is laughable. I was a foreigner in America; and I can truly claim that the sense of my own laughable position never left me. But when the native and the foreigner have finished with seeing the fun of each other in things that are meant to be serious, they both approach the far more delicate and dangerous ground of things that are meant to be funny. The sense of humour is generally very national; perhaps that is why the internationalists are so careful to purge themselves of it. I had occasion during the war to consider the rights and wrongs of certain differences alleged to have arisen between the English and American soldiers at the front. And, rightly or wrongly, I came to the conclusion that they arose from the failure to understand when a foreigner is serious and when he is humorous. And it is in the very nature of the best sort of joke to be the worst sort of insult if it is not taken as a joke.
  • Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce psychoanalysis — that is, enforce confession without absolution.
    • "Fads and Public Opinion"
  • The truth is that prohibitions might have done far less harm as prohibitions, if a vague association had not arisen, on some dark day of human unreason, between prohibition and progress. And it was the progress that did the harm, not the prohibition. Men can enjoy life under considerable limitations, if they can be sure of their limited enjoyments; but under Progressive Puritanism we can never be sure of anything. The curse of it is not limitation; it is unlimited limitation. The evil is not in the restriction; but in the fact that nothing can ever restrict the restriction. The prohibitions are bound to progress point by point; more and more human rights and pleasures must of necessity be taken away; for it is of the nature of this futurism that the latest fad is the faith of the future, and the most fantastic fad inevitably makes the pace. Thus the worst thing in the seventeenth-century aberration was not so much Puritanism as sectarianism. It searched for truth not by synthesis but by subdivision. It not only broke religion into small pieces, but it was bound to choose the smallest piece.
    • "Fads and Public Opinion"
  • The last hundred years has seen a general decline in the democratic idea. If there be anybody left to whom this historical truth appears a paradox, it is only because during that period nobody has been taught history, least of all the history of ideas. If a sort of intellectual inquisition had been established, for the definition and differentiation of heresies, it would have been found that the original republican orthodoxy had suffered more and more from secessions, schisms, and backslidings. The highest point of democratic idealism and conviction was towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the American Republic was 'dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal.' It was then that the largest number of men had the most serious sort of conviction that the political problem could be solved by the vote of peoples instead of the arbitrary power of princes and privileged orders.
  • There is truth in every ancient fable, and there is here even something of it in the fancy that finds the symbol of the Republic in the bird that bore the bolts of Jove. Owls and bats may wander where they will in darkness, and for them as for the sceptics the universe may have no centre; kites and vultures may linger as they like over carrion, and for them as for the plutocrats existence may have no origin and no end; but it was far back in the land of legends, where instincts find their true images, that the cry went forth that freedom is an eagle, whose glory is gazing at the sun.
    • "The Future of Democracy"

Eugenics and Other Evils (1922)

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  • 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 statutes, 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.
    • Ch. VII: "The Established Church of Doubt" (pp. 76-77). [2] Dale Ahlquist, president and co-founder of the American Chesterton Society, commenting of this passage writes: "Eugenics is also about the tyranny of science. Forget the tired old argument about religion persecuting science. Chesterton points out the obvious fact that in the modern world, it is the quite the other way around." [Lecture 36: Eugenics and Other Evils]

Letters on  Polish Affairs (1922)

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  • I judged the Poles by their enemies. And I found it was an almost unfailing- truth that their enemies were the enemies of magna- nimity and manhood. If a man loved slavery, if he loved usury, if he loved terrorism and all the trampled mire of materialistic politics, I have always found that he added to these affections the passion of a hatred of Poland. She could be judged in the light of that hatred; and the judgment has proved to be right. [2]

The Everlasting Man (1925)

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  • About sex especially men are born unbalanced; we might almost say men are born mad. They scarcely reach sanity till they reach sanctity.
  • If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep.
  • In the days of my youth the Religion of Humanity was a term commonly applied to Comtism, the theory of certain rationalists who worshipped corporate mankind as a Supreme Being. Even in the days of my youth, I remarked that there was something slightly odd about despising and dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystical and even maniacal contradiction; and then asking us to adore a deity who is a hundred million persons in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance. p. 83
  • But every man feels in his heart that [...] the ultimate idea of a world is not bad or even neutral; staring at the sky or the grass or the truths of mathematics or even a new-laid egg, he has a vague feeling like the shadow of that saying of the great Christian philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, “Every existence, as such, is good.” On the other hand, something else tells him that it is unmanly and debased and even diseased to minimise evil to a dot or even a blot. He realises that optimism is morbid. It is if possible even more morbid than pessimism.
    • People's Library Edition (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927), pp. 283-284 [3]

The Dagger with Wings (1926)

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  • We are talking about an artist; and for the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul.
 
All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.
  • An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.
  • '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 some things, of course,' conceded Father Brown; 'and therefore, of course, I don't believe other things.' .
  • 'You do believe it,' he said. 'You do believe everything. We all believe everything, even when we deny everything. The denyers believe. The unbelievers believe. Don't you feel in your heart that these contradictions do not really contradict: that there is a cosmos that contains them all? The soul goes round upon a wheel of stars and all things return; perhaps Strake and I have striven in many shapes, beast against beast and bird against bird, and perhaps we shall strive for ever. But since we seek and need each other, even that eternal hatred is an eternal love. Good and evil go round in a wheel that is one thing and not many. Do you not realize in your heart, do you not believe behind all your beliefs, that there is but one reality and we are its shadows; and that all things are but aspects of one thing: a centre where men melt into Man and Man into God?'
    'No,' said Father Brown.
  • He had the notion that because I am a clergyman I should believe anything. Many people have little notions of that kind.
  • All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.
  • '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.
  • Yet he is right enough about there being a white magic, if he only knows where to look for it.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1927)

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  • [N]othing is more terrible than a bed; since it is always waiting to be a death-bed.
    • Ch. I: "'The Myth of Stevenson'"
  • Those dry Deists and hard-headed Utilitarians who stalked the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were very obviously the products of the national religious spirit. The Scottish atheists were unmistakable children of the Kirk. And though they often seemed absurdly detached and dehumanised, the world is now rather suffering for want of such dull lucidity.
    • Ch. V: "The Scottish Stories"
  • In the days when Stevenson's ancestors the Covenanters were fighting with the Cavaliers, a fine old Cavalier of the Episcopalian persuasion made a rather interesting remark; that the change he really hated was represented by saying 'The Lord' instead of 'Our Lord.' The latter implied affection, the former only fear; indeed he described the former succinctly as the talk of devils. And this is so far true that the very eloquent language in which the name of 'The Lord' has figured has generally been the language of might and majesty and even terror. And there really was implied in it in varying degrees the idea of glorifying God for His greatness rather than His goodness. And again there occurred the natural inversion of ideas. Since the Puritan was content to cry with the Moslem: 'God is great,' so the descendant of the Puritan is always a little inclined to cry with the Nietzschean: 'Greatness is God.' In some of the really evil extremes, this sentiment shaded darkly into a sort of diabolism.
    • Ch. V: "The Scottish Stories"
  • It has been much debated whether bullies are always cowards; I am content to remark that the admirers of bullies are always, by the very nature of things, trying to be cowards. If they do not always succeed, it is because they have unconscious virtues restraining that obscene worship.
    • Ch. V: "The Scottish Stories"
  • [G]uesses about the fashions of the future are generally quite wide of the mark, because they are founded on a very obvious fallacy. They always imply that public taste will continue to progress in its present direction; which is, in truth, the only thing we know that it will not do. A thing that wanders away in great winding curves may end anywhere; but to turn each curve into a straight line striking out into the void will be wrong in any case.
    • Ch. IX: "The Philosophy of Gesture"

The Thing (1929)

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The Thing : Why I Am A Catholic (1929)
  • In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
    This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.
    • Ch. IV : The Drift From Domesticity


Misattributed

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  • An open mind is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth. Mouths and minds were made to shut; they were made to open only in order to shut.
    • Original quote:
      • For my friend said that he opened his intellect as the sun opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening's sake, opening infinitely for ever. But I said that I opened my intellect as I opened my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid. I was doing it at the moment. And as I truly pointed out, it would look uncommonly silly if I went on opening my mouth infinitely, for ever and ever.
      • The Extraordinary Cabman, one of many essays collected in Tremendous Trifles (1909)
  • When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing — they believe in anything.
    • This quotation actually comes from page 211 of Émile Cammaerts' book The Laughing Prophet : The Seven Virtues and G. K. Chesterton (1937) in which he quotes Chesterton as having Father Brown say, in "The Oracle of the Dog" (1923): "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense." Cammaerts then interposes his own analysis between further quotes from Father Brown: "'It's drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it's coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition.' The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything: 'And a dog is an omen and a cat is a mystery.'" Note that the remark about believing in anything is outside the quotation marks — it is Cammaerts. The correct attribution was reportedly first traced by Pasquale Accardo. It was also credited to Nigel Rees (as cited in First Things, 1997).
  • A weak mind is like a microscope, which magnifies trifling things but cannot receive great ones.
    • Though sometimes misattributed to Chesterton, this is generally attributed to Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, with the first publication of this yet located is in a section of proverbs called "Diamond Dust" in Eliza Cook's Journal, No. 98 (15 March 1851), with the first attribution to Chesterfield as yet located in: Many Thoughts of Many Minds (1862) edited by Henry Southgate.
  • Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.
    • According to The American Chesterton Society, this quotation is actually a paraphrase by John F. Kennedy of a passage from The Thing (1929) in which Chesterton made reference to a fence or gate erected across a road: "The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
  • Q: What's wrong with the world? A: I am.
    • Purportedly a response by Chesterton to the question posed around 1910 by the Times of London (along with other luminaries), but biographer Kevin Belmonte, in 'Defiant Joy: the Remarkable Life & Impact of G.K. Chesterton', was unable to verify. Belmonte surmises its origin in an anecdote that while writing What's Wrong with the World (told in the book's preface), he would delight in telling society ladies that "I have been doing 'What is Wrong' all this morning."[4]
  • And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.
    • A popular internet misattribution.[citation needed] A number of variants of the "rain on your parade" theme appear, with different sources
  • A man knocking on the door of a brothel is looking for God.
    • The source is actually a 1945 book by Bruce Marshall, The World, The Flesh, and Father Smith, in which he says, "...the young man who rings the bell at the brothel is unconsciously looking for God."
  • A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been the boy.
    • Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton, Joseph Pearce
  • Moral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles.
    • A popular internet misattribution, also attributed (without source) to Chesterton in several books.

Quotes about Chesterton

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In its fundamental conception, as well as in many of the significant details of its working out, Lord of the Rings is heavily indebted to G. K. Chesterton's now little read poem of 1911, The Ballad of the White Horse. ~ Cristopher Clausen
 
Like Lord of the Rings, Chesterton's poem is set in a heroic society after the decay of a highly civilized imperial power …King Alfred, its hero, like Tolkien's Aragorn, is an idealized heroic figure who roams around in humble disguise and is sometimes mistreated by the ignorant. ~ Cristopher Clausen
 
Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight. ~ Neil Gaiman
  • The insistence of the Christian doctrine on man's limited condition was somehow enough of a philosophy to allow its adherents a very deep insight into the essential inhumanity of all those modern attempts – psychological, technical, biological – to change man into the monster of superman. They realized that a pursuit of happiness which actually means to wipe away all tears will pretty quickly end by wiping out all laughter. It was again Christianity which taught them that nothing human can exist beyond tears and laughter, except the silence of despair.
    • Hannah Arendt, commenting on Chesterton and Charles Péguy in “Christianity and Revolution”, in Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (1994), edited by Jerome Kohn, p. 154
  • Mr Chesterton was not mistaken in his vocation when he set out to write stories. He is a born story-teller, which is quite a different thing from being a born novelist. The old trade of story-telling is, as he himself has said, a much older thing than the modern art of fiction. The Oriental who spread his carpet in the marketplace, the medieval bard who sang a ballad at his master's feast, made no appeal to that curiosity about the varieties of the human soul which is increasingly the inspiration of the modern novel. If he touched on human psychology at all he dealt only with those primal passions and desires which are common to all normal men. But, for the interest of his art, he depended simply upon his capacity to tell a good story, and to tell it well. In the last resort, Mr. Chesterton's novels depend for their interest on the same power.
  • In its fundamental conception, as well as in many of the significant details of its working out, Lord of the Rings is heavily indebted to G. K. Chesterton's now little read poem of 1911,The Ballad of the White Horse.
    The major theme of both works is the war and eventual victory, despite all odds, of an alliance of good folk against vastly more powerful forces of evil, and the return of a king to his rightful state. Like Lord of the Rings, Chesterton's poem is set in a heroic society after the decay of a highly civilized imperial power — in England, that is to say, in the aftermath of the Roman Empire. (Tolkien's Minas Tirith, built on seven levels, greatly resembles a medieval idealization of Rome.) King Alfred, its hero,is fighting a losing war to save his kingdom from complete conquest by the Danes. As one would expect with Chesterton, it is a war of white against black, of Christianity against a diabolical paganism that has defeated Rome and is now trying to make all good men its slaves. ... The enemy is not simply Danes, or barbarians in general, but a wholly malignant and almost irresistible force that stands behind all the enemies of Christianity: This power blights everything it touches — there are repeated references to its distorting effects even on the natural world — and the men who serve it become like Tolkien's Orcs. ... To fight against this menace, Alfred, hiding in exile, summons three kindreds of free, Christian peoples as allies. Alfred himself, like Tolkien's Aragorn, is an idealized heroic figure who roams around in humble disguise and is sometimes mistreated by the ignorant. Instead of Dwarves, Elves, and Men of Numenorean descent, he leads an alliance of Saxons, Celts, and Romans.
    • Cristopher Clausen, in "The Lord of the Rings and The Ballad of the White Horse" in South Atlantic Bulletin 39.2 (May 1974)
  • Chesterton was important — as important to me in his way as C. S. Lewis had been.
    You see, while I loved Tolkien and while I wished to have written his book, I had no desire at all to write like him. Tolkien's words and sentences seemed like natural things, like rock formations or waterfalls, and wanting to write like Tolkien would have been, for me, like wanting to blossom like a cherry tree or climb a tree like a squirrel or rain like a thunderstorm. Chesterton was the complete opposite. I was always aware, reading Chesterton, that there was someone writing this who rejoiced in words, who deployed them on the page as an artist deploys his paints upon his palette. Behind every Chesterton sentence there was someone painting with words, and it seemed to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you could hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.
  • Chesterton and Tolkien and Lewis were, as I've said, not the only writers I read between the ages of six and thirteen, but they were the authors I read over and over again; each of them played a part in building me. Without them, I cannot imagine that I would have become a writer, and certainly not a writer of fantastic fiction. I would not have understood that the best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming, nor that the majesty and the magic of belief and dreams could be a vital part of life and of writing.
    And without those three writers, I would not be here today. And nor, of course, would any of you. I thank you.
    • Neil Gaiman, in his "Mythcon 35 Guest of Honor Speech", in Mythprint (October 2004)
  • I consider it as being without possible comparison the best book ever written on St. Thomas. Nothing short of genius can account for such an achievement. Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a ‘clever’ book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas...cannot fail to perceive that the so-called ‘wit’ of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. He has guessed all that which we had tried to demonstrate, and he has said all that which they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas. Chesterton was one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed; he was deep because he was right; and he could not help being right; but he could not either help being modest and charitable, so he left it to those who could understand him to know that he was right, and deep; to the others, he apologized for being right, and he made up for being deep by being witty. That is all they can see of him.
  • There is great poetry being written now. G.K. Chesterton, for instance.
  • To speak of ideals and their significance as goals to be reached for is to put one's finger on an ever-recurring theme in Chesterton's productive life, the indignant rejection of pessimism in any and all of its forms. This is not to say that he was unaware that there is evil — a great deal of it — in this world. His life was one continuous campaign against the evils he perceived, one of the chief of which was the denial that there is good in the world, the denial that life is basically good.
    • Quentin Lauer, in G. K. Chesterton: Philosopher Without Portfolio (1988), p. 77
  • Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent – though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one – was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’. Every book that he wrote, every paragraph, every sentence, every incident in every story, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealization of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it – as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine – had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous over-estimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton’s battle poems, such as ‘Lepanto’ or ‘The Ballad of Saint Barbara’, make ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.
  • The meeting between Chesterton and Il Duce occurred in 1929, ten years before the war, at a time when, whatever his other faults, Mussolini had reintroduced a mark spirit of optimism and freshness to an Italy that had formerly been pessimistic and stagnant. Throughout the 1920s, Chesterton thought he saw in the Italian leader qualities that might have offset certain evils in Britain. It is important to keep in mind that whatever the misreadings of fascism, Chesterton always had some quite specific British problem in view when he praises Mussolini.
    • Robert Royal, on admiration by Chesterton of Benito Mussolini and his influence on Europe, in "The Pearl of Great Price", his Introduction to "The Resurrection of Rome" (1930) in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (1990) by Vol. XXI, p. 272
  • For Chesterton... British public rhetoric was more than a mere style: "The motive is the desire to disguise a thing even when expressing it." To his mind, the dictator's words, even if his actions were as bad or worse than those of the parliamentarians, were morally and stylistically superior. At least they said openly what was being done openly. The British rhetoric, for Chesterton, was one with the decayed British liberalism that allowed exploitation of workers by plutocrats who were never rebuked by government or the courts. If nothing else, Mussolini's language was a bracing alternative.
    Gazing back across the horrors of World War II, it is hard for us to imagine how good men like Chesterton, whatever their objections to British liberalism, could admire Mussolini, though several prominent intellectuals and politicians did. Many of us have family members or friends who fought or died to stop the fascist darkness, and we find it difficult to sympathize with Chesterton's desire to be fair to Mussolini. Mussolini's thuggish violence, of course, Chesterton and others rejected. But their admiration was an index of the scale of reform they thought needed.
    • Robert Royal, in "The Pearl of Great Price", his Introduction to "The Resurrection of Rome" (1930) in The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton (1990) by Vol. XXI, p. 274
  • I have the greatest possible admiration for “Tremendous Trifles” and the other fairy tales – Heavens! how I can see Mr. Chesterton's beaming face crying happily, “But that’s just it! Life is a fairy tale!” Heavens! – but I believe his view of life to be based on a misconception. To put it in a theological way, he denies that God made the brain as well as the heart. He despises wisdom...Like all sentimentalists he is cruel.
    • Rebecca West, "Mr Chesterton in Hysterics:A Study in Prejudice", The Clarion, 14th November 1913. Reprinted in Jane Marcus,The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17. Indiana University Press, 1982.
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  1. ↑ [5]
  2. ↑ https://archive.org/stream/lettersonpolisha00sarouoft/lettersonpolisha00sarouoft_djvu.txt
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