G.K. Chesterton

“The poetic does not misrepresent the speech one half so much as the speech misrepresents the soul.”

“If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.”

“If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.”

“I cannot betray you, but I might betray myself. Come, come! wait and see me betray myself. I shall do it so nicely.”

“I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking.”

“No man knows he is young while he is young.”

“When Nietszche says, "A new commandment I give to you,be hard" he is really saying, "A new commandment I give to you, be dead." Sensibility is the definition oflife.”

“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.”

“Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.”

“A man who is perpetually thinking of whether this race or that race is strong, of whether this cause or thatcause is promising, is the man who will never believe in anything long enough to make it succeed.”

“What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.”

“Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

“It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.”

“Mysticism conceives something transcending experience; religion seeks glimpses of a better good or a worse evil than experience can give. Reincarnation need only extend experiences in the sense of repeating them.”

“Plato in some sense anticipated the Catholic realism, as attacked by the heretical nominalism, by insisting on the equally fundamental fact that ideas are realities; that ideas exist just as men exist. Plato however seemed sometimes almost to fancy that ideas exist as men do not exist; or that the men need hardly be considered where they conflict with the ideas.”

“most cannibalism is not a primitive or even a bestial habit. It is artificial and even artistic; a sort of art for art's sake. Men do not do it because they do not think it horrible; but, on the contrary, because they do think it horrible...It is by no means clear, so far as I know that the Eskimos ever indulged in human sacrifice. They were not civilised enough.”

“And the greatest of the poets, when he defined the poet, did not say that he gave us the universe or the absolute or the infinite; but, in his own larger language, a local habitation and a name.”

“The substance of all such paganism may be summarised thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to the view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in the most rational of these civilisations. It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalise them, and even then only by trying to allegorise them. But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom.”

“Very deep things in our nature, some dim sense of the dependence of great things upon small, some dark suggestion that the things nearest to us stretch far beyond our power, some sacramental feeling of the magic in material substances, and many more emotions past fading out, are in an idea like that of the external soul. The power even in the myths of savages is like the power in the metaphors of poets. The soul of such a metaphor is often very emphatically an external soul.”

“When the Professor is told by the Polynesian that once there was nothing except a great feathered serpent, unless the learned man feels a thrill and a half temptation to wish it were true, he is no judge of such things at all. When he is assured, on the best Red Indian authority, that a primitive hero carried the sun and moon and stars in a box, unless he clasps his hands and almost kicks his legs as a child would at such a charming fancy, he knows nothing about the matter.”

“These men were conscious of the Fall, if they were conscious of nothing else; and the same is true of all heathen humanity. Those who have fallen may remember the fall, even when they forget the height. Some such tantalising blank or break in memory is at the back of all pagan sentiment.”

“But always, it has been truly said, the savage is talkative about his mythology and taciturn about his religion.”

“But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.”

“I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.”

“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.”

“I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.”

“In one sense at any rate it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men.”

“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.”

“This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.”

“Yes, he said in a voice indescribable, you are right. I am afraid of him. Therefore I swear by God that I will seek out this man whom I fear until I find him, and strike him on the mouth. If heaven were his throne and the earth his footstool, I swear that I would pull him down. How? asked the staring Professor. Why? Because I am afraid of him, said Syme; and no man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.”

“The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong.And Right and Left, said Syme with a simple eagerness, I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me.”

“For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.”

“There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism -- self-denial.”

“The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartlepool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet.”

“We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.”

“I don't want the universe broken up just yet," drawled the Marquis. "I want to do a lot of beastly things before I die. I thought of one yesterday in bed.”

“And well may God with the serving-folkCast in His dreadful lot;Is not He too a servant,And is not He forgot?For was not God my gardenerAnd silent like a slave;That opened oaks on the uplandsOr thicket in graveyard gave?And was not God my armourer,All patient and unpaid,That sealed my skull as a helmet,And ribs for hauberk made?Did not a great grey servantOf all my sires and me,Build this pavilion of the pines,And herd the fowls and fill the vines,And labour and pass and leave no signsSave mercy and mystery?For God is a great servant,And rose before the day,From some primordial slumber torn;But all we living later bornSleep on, and rise after the morn,And the Lord has gone away.On things half sprung from sleeping,All sleeping suns have shone,They stretch stiff arms, the yawning trees,The beasts blink upon hands and knees,Man is awake and does and sees-But Heaven has done and gone.For who shall guess the good riddleOr speak of the Holiest,Save in faint figures and failing words,Who loves, yet laughs among the swords,Labours, and is at rest?But some see God like Guthrum,Crowned, with a great beard curled,But I see God like a good giant,That, laboring, lifts the world.”

“And he set to rhyme his ale-measures,And he sang aloud his laws,Because of the joy of giants,The joy without a cause.”

“Sirs, I am but a nameless man,A rhymester without a home,Yet since I come of the Wessex clayAnd carry the cross of Rome,I will even answer the mighty earlThat asked of Wessex menWhy they be meek and monkish folk, And bow to the White Lord's broken yoke;What sign have we save blood and smoke?Here is my answer then.That on you is fallen the shadow,And not upon the Name;That though we scatter and though we fly,And you hang over us like the sky,You are more tired of victory,Than we are tired of shame.That though you hunt the Christian man Like a hare on the hill-side,The hare has still more heart to runThan you have heart to ride.That though all lances split on you,All swords be heaved in vain,We have more lust again to loseThan you to win again.Your lord sits high in the saddle,A broken-hearted king,But our king Alfred, lost from fame,Fallen among foes or bonds of shame,In I know not what mean trade or name,Has still some song to sing.Our monks go robed in rain and snow,But the heart of flame therein,But you go clothed in feasts and flames,When all is ice within;Nor shall all iron dooms make dumbMen wandering ceaselessly,If it be not better to fast for joyThan feast for misery.Nor monkish order onlySlides down, as field to fen,All things achieved and chosen pass,As the White Horse fades in the grass,No work of Christian men.Ere the sad gods that made your godsSaw their sad sunrise pass,The White Horse of the White Horse Vale,That you have left to darken and fail,Was cut out of the grass.Therefore your end is on you,Is on you and your kings,Not for a fire in Ely fen,Not that your gods are nine or ten,But because it is only Christian menGuard even heathen things.For our God hath blessed creation,Calling it good. I knowWhat spirit with whom you blindly band Hath blessed destruction with his hand;Yet by God's death the stars shall standAnd the small apples grow.”

“People, if you have any prayers,Say prayers for me:And lay me under a Christian stoneIn that lost land I thought my own,To wait till the holy horn is blown,And all poor men are free.”

“And the beasts of the earth and the birds looked down,In a wild solemnity,On a stranger sight than a sylph or elf,On one man laughing at himselfUnder the greenwood tree-The giant laughter of Christian menThat roars through a thousand tales,Where greed is an ape and pride is an ass,And Jack's away with his master's lass,And the miser is banged with all his brass,The farmer with all his flails;Tales that tumble and tales that trick, Yet end not all in scorning-Of kings and clowns in a merry plight,And the clock gone wrong and the world gone right,That the mummers sing upon Christmas nightAnd Christmas day in the morning.”

“Do you see this lantern? cried Syme in a terrible voice.'Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy mankind, you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit to find it.”

“The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God's paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle - and not lose it.”

“To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.”

“We are in this fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world.”

“We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbors.”

“Art is the signature of man.”

“But if he has lost the sane vision, he can only get it back by something very like a mad vision; that is, by seeing a man as a strange animal and realising how strange an animal he is.”

“For those in whom a mere reaction has thus become an obsession, I do seriously recommend the imaginative effort of conceiving the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen.”

“Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.”