G.K. Chesterton

“It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.”

“The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.”

“There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.”

“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”

“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.”

“What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.”

“A Second Childhood.”When all my days are endingAnd I have no song to sing,I think that I shall not be too oldTo stare at everything;As I stared once at a nursery doorOr a tall tree and a swing.Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangsOn all my sins and me,Because He does not take awayThe terror from the treeAnd stones still shine along the roadThat are and cannot be.Men grow too old for love, my love,Men grow too old for wine,But I shall not grow too old to seeUnearthly daylight shine,Changing my chamber’s dust to snowTill I doubt if it be mine.Behold, the crowning mercies melt,The first surprises stay;And in my dross is dropped a giftFor which I dare not pray:That a man grow used to grief and joyBut not to night and day.Men grow too old for love, my love,Men grow too old for lies;But I shall not grow too old to seeEnormous night arise,A cloud that is larger than the worldAnd a monster made of eyes.Nor am I worthy to unlooseThe latchet of my shoe;Or shake the dust from off my feetOr the staff that bears me throughOn ground that is too good to last,Too solid to be true.Men grow too old to woo, my love,Men grow too old to wed;But I shall not grow too old to seeHung crazily overheadIncredible rafters when I wakeAnd I find that I am not dead.A thrill of thunder in my hair:Though blackening clouds be plain,Still I am stung and startledBy the first drop of the rain:Romance and pride and passion passAnd these are what remain.Strange crawling carpets of the grass,Wide windows of the sky;So in this perilous grace of GodWith all my sins go I:And things grow new though I grow old,Though I grow old and die.”

“Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.”

“If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments”

“Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in.”

“Here dies another dayDuring which I have had eyes, ears, hands And the great world round me;And with tomorrow begins another. Why am I allowed two?”

“The woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn’t obeyed.”

“You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.”

“All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.”

“The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.”

“But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.”

“The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.”

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

“Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the societybegins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless. We might almost say that in a society without such good things we should hardly have any test by which to register a decline; that is why some of the static commercial oligarchies like Carthage have rather an air in history of standing and staring like mummies, so dried up and swathed and embalmed that no man knows when they are new or old.”

“Can you not see," I said, "that fairy tales in their essence are quite solid and straightforward; but that this everlasting fiction about modern life is in its nature essentially incredible? Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is—what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is—what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos.”

“The more truly we can see life as a fairytale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war with the dragon who is wasting fairyland.”

“The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.”

“The hardest thing to remember about our time, of course, is simply that it is a time- we all instinctively think of it as the Day of Judgment.”

“Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which your are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. ... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal and that you are a paralytic.”

“Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.”

“He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.”

“The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.”

“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.”

“Who are you?' he asked suddenly.I'm not sure,' replied the other. 'I rather think I am your long-lost brother.'But I haven't got a brother,' objected Tommy.It only shows how very long-lost I was,' replied his remarkable relative. 'But I assure you that, before they managed to long-loose me, I used to live in this house myself.”

“What are blue-stockings?' asked Tommy.Naturally you don't know,' replied the other. 'If you did, you would sympathize more with Bluebeard. They were ladies who were always reading books. They even read them aloud.”

“The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar.”

“The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.”

“Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.”

“We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.”

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”

“Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it and it will endure a thousand years.”

“I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.”

“The gentlemen are up there, sare," he said. "They do talk and they do laugh at what they talk. They do say they will throw bombs at ze king.”

“War in the wide modern sense, is possible, not because more men disagree, but because more men agree.”

“He has a fancy for always sitting in a pitch-dark room. He says it makes his thoughts brighter.”

“There was one special thing you promised me at the beginning of the affair, and which you have certainly given me by the end of it.""What do you mean?" cried the chaotic Gregory. "What did I promise you?""A very entertaining evening," said Syme, and he made a military salute with his sword-stick as the steamboart slid away.”

“For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.”

“And as I close this chaotic volume I open again the strange small book from which all Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural, almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of Hell. Yet He restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray. There was something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.”

“That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.”

“It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. . . . But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it.”

“He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.”

“The men of the East may spell the stars,And times and triumphs mark,But the men signed of the cross of ChristGo gaily in the dark.”

“I cannot count the pebbles in the brook.Well hath He spoken: "Swear not by thy head.Thou knowest not the hairs," though He, we read,writes that wild number in His own strange book.I cannot count the sands or search the seas,death cometh, and I leave so much untrod.Grant my immortal aureole, O my God,and I will name the leaves upon the trees,In heaven I shall stand on gold and glass,still brooding earth's arithmetic to spell;or see the fading of the fires of hellere I have thanked my God for all the grass.”

“To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school. Nor can I imagine anything that would do humanity more good than the advent of a race of Supermen, for them to fight like dragons. If the Superman is better than we, of course we need not fight him; but in that case, why not call him a Saint? But if he is merely stronger (whether physically, mentally, or morally stronger, I do not care a farthing), then he ought to have to reckon with us at least for all the strength we have. If we are weaker than he, that is no reason why we should be weaker than ourselves. If we are not tall enough to touch the giant's knees, that is no reason why we should become shorter by falling on our own.”

“I entertain a private suspicion that physical sports were much more really effective and beneficent when they were not taken quite so seriously. One of the first essentials of sport being healthy is that it should be delightful; it is rapidly becoming a false religion with austerities and prostrations.”