G.K. Chesterton Quote #1
, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always
have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could
never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because
it might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it.G.K. Chesterton Quote #2
...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #3
...even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #4
...It expands; it only destroys because it broadens; even so, thought only destroys because it broadens. A man's brain is a bomb, he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull with violence. My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man's brain must expand, if it breaks up the universe.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #5
...it is the fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seems to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #6
...the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #7
...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #8
...this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #9
...vers libre, (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #10
The Donkey
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.G.K. Chesterton Quote #11
The Last Hero
The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day,
There was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away,
And drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide,
Spewed out of house and stable, beggared of flag and bride.
The heavens are bowed about my head, shouting like seraph wars,
With rains that might put out the sun and clean the sky of stars,
Rains like the fall of ruined seas from secret worlds above,
The roaring of the rains of God none but the lonely love.
Feast in my hall, O foemen, and eat and drink and drain,
You never loved the sun in heaven as I have loved the rain.
The chance of battle changes -- so may all battle be;
I stole my lady bride from them, they stole her back from me.
I rent her from her red-roofed hall, I rode and saw arise,
More lovely than the living flowers the hatred in her eyes.
She never loved me, never bent, never was less divine;
The sunset never loved me, the wind was never mine.
Was it all nothing that she stood imperial in duresse?
Silence itself made softer with the sweeping of her dress.
O you who drain the cup of life, O you who wear the crown,
You never loved a woman's smile as I have loved her frown.
The wind blew out from Bergen to the dawning of the day,
They ride and run with fifty spears to break and bar my way,
I shall not die alone, alone, but kin to all the powers,
As merry as the ancient sun and fighting like the flowers.
How white their steel, how bright their eyes! I love each laughing knave,
Cry high and bid him welcome to the banquet of the brave.
Yea, I will bless them as they bend and love them where they lie,
When on their skulls the sword I swing falls shattering from the sky.
The hour when death is like a light and blood is like a rose, --
You never loved your friends, my friends, as I shall love my foes.
Know you what earth shall lose to-night, what rich uncounted loans,
What heavy gold of tales untold you bury with my bones?
My loves in deep dim meadows, my ships that rode at ease,
Ruffling the purple plumage of strange and secret seas.
To see this fair earth as it is to me alone was given,
The blow that breaks my brow to-night shall break the dome of heaven.
The skies I saw, the trees I saw after no eyes shall see,
To-night I die the death of God; the stars shall die with me;
One sound shall sunder all the spears and break the trumpet's breath:
You never laughed in all your life as I shall laugh in death.G.K. Chesterton Quote #12
The Skeleton
Chattering finch and water-fly
Are not merrier than I;
Here among the flowers I lie
Laughing everlastingly.
No: I may not tell the best;
Surely, friends, I might have guessed
Death was but the good King's jest,
It was hid so carefully.G.K. Chesterton Quote #13
[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #14
[Buddhism and Christianity] are in one sense parallel and equal; as a mound and a hollow, as a valley and a hill. There is a sense in which that sublime despair is the only alternative to that divine audacity. It is even true that the truly spiritual and intellectual man sees it as sort of dilemma; a very hard and terrible choice. There is little else on earth that can compare with these for completeness. And he who does not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #15
[T]he most comic things of all are exactly the things most worth doing--such as making love.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #16
[The materialist] thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think [the materialist] a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #17
{We} have not to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule; rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can’t.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #18
A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #19
A few people have ventured to imitate Shakespeare's tragedy. But no audacious spirit has dreamed or dared to imitate Shakespeare's comedy. No one has made any real attempt to recover the loves and the laughter of Elizabethan England. The low dark arches, the low strong pillars upon which Shakespeare's temple rests we can all explore and handle. We can all get into his mere tragedy; we can all explore his dungeon and penetrate into his coal-cellar, but we stretch our hands and crane our necks in vain towards that height where the tall turrets of his levity are tossed towards the sky. Perhaps it is right that this should be so; properly understood, comedy is an even grander thing than tragedy.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #20
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #21
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #22
A head can be beaten small enough until it fits the hat.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #23
A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #24
A man cannot think himself out of mental evil; for it is actually the organ of thought that has become diseased, ungovernable, and, as it were, independent. He can only be saved by will or faith. The moment his mere reason moves, it moves in the old circular rut; he will go round and round his logical circle.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #25
A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #26
A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #27
A man must love a thing very much if he practices it without any hope of fame or money, but even practice it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #28
A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #29
A man who says that no patriot should attack the [war] until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men…he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, I am sorry to say we are ruined, and is not sorry at all…Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men.
G.K. Chesterton Quote #30
A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.
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