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It May Be A Mere Patriotic Bias, Though I Do Not Think So, But It Seems To Me That The English Aristocracy Is Not Only The Type, But Is The Crown And Flower Of All Actual Aristocracies; It Has All The Oligarchical Virtues As Well As All The Defects. It Is Casual, It Is Kind, It Is Courageous In Obvious Matters; But It Has One Great Merit That Overlaps Even These. The Great And Very Obvious Merit Of The English Aristocracy Is That Nobody Could Possibly Take It Seriously.

-Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Gilbert K. Chesterton

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It May Be A Mere Patriotic Bias, Though I Do Not Think So, But It Seems To Me That The English Aristocracy Is Not Only The Type, But Is The Crown And Flower Of All Actual Aristocracies; It Has All The Oligarchical Virtues As Well As All The Defects. It Is Casual, It Is Kind, It Is Courageous In Obvious Matters; But It Has One Great Merit That Overlaps Even These. The Great And Very Obvious Merit Of The English Aristocracy Is That Nobody Could Possibly Take It Seriously.

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At The Bottom Of All The Tributes Paid To Democracy Is The Little Man, Walking Into The Little Booth, With A Little Pencil, Making A Little Cross On A Little Bit Of Paper. . . .

Architecture Is The Alphabet Of Giants; It Is The Largest Set Of Symbols Ever Made To Meet The Eyes Of Men. A Tower Stands Up Like A Sort Of Simplified Stature, Of Much More Than Heroic Size.

Grey Is A Colour That Always Seems On The Eve Of Changing To Some Other Colour.

We Ought To Be Interested In That Darkest And Most Real Part Of A Man In Which Dwell Not The Vices That He Does Not Display, But The Virtues That He Cannot.

How Quickly Revolutions Grow Old; And, Worse Still, Respectable.

If I Had Only One Sermon To Preach It Would Be A Sermon Against Pride.

One Can Hardly Think Too Little Of One's Self. One Can Hardly Think Too Much Of One's Soul.

If You Happen To Read Fairy Tales, You Will Observe That One Idea Runs From One End Of Them To The Other--the Idea That Peace And Happiness Can Only Exist On Some Condition. This Idea, Which Is The Core Of Ethics, Is The Core Of The Nursery-tales.

Wherever There Is Animal Worship, There Is Human Sacrifice.

Just At Present You Only See The Tree By The Light Of The Lamp. I Wonder When You Would Ever See The Lamp By The Light Of The Tree.

There Are Many Ways To Fall Down, But There's Only One Way To Stand Up Straight.

[capitalism Is] That Commercial System In Which Supply Immediately Answers To Demand, And In Which Everybody Seems To Be Thoroughly Dissatisfied And Unable To Get Anything He Wants.

You Can't Have The Family Farm Without The Family.

The Great Intellectual Tradition That Comes Down To Us From The Past Was Never Interrupted Or Lost Through Such Trifles As The Sack Of Rome, The Triumph Of Attila, Or All The Barbarian Invasions Of The Dark Ages. It Was Lost After The Introduction Of Printing, The Discovery Of America, The Founding Of The Royal Society, And All The Enlightenment Of The Renaissance And The Modern World. It Was There, If Anywhere, That There Was Lost Or Impatiently Snapped The Long Thin Delicate Thread That Had Descended From Distant Antiquity; The Thread Of That Unusual Human Hobby: The Habit Of Thinking.

The Difficulty Of Explaining ‘why I Am A Catholic’ Is That There Are Ten Thousand Reasons All Amounting To One Reason: That Catholicism Is True.

The Best Kind Of Giving Is Thanksgiving.

The Poet Only Asks To Get His Head Into The Heavens. It Is The Logician Who Seeks To Get The Heavens Into His Head. And It Is His Head That Splits.

Angels Can Fly Because They Take Themselves Lightly.

Thrift Is The Really Romantic Thing; Economy Is More Romantic Than Extravagance... Thrift Is Poetic Because It Is Creative; Waste Is Unpoetic Because It Is Waste... If A Man Could Undertake To Make Use Of All The Things In His Dustbin, He Would Be A Broader Genius Than Shakespeare.

Somehow One Can Never Manage To Be An Atheist.

I Would Look At The First Chapter Of Any New Novel As A Final Test Of Its Merits. If There Was A Murdered Man Under The Sofa In The First Chapter, I Read The Story. If There Was No Murdered Man Under The Sofa In The First Chapter, I Dismissed The Story As Tea-table Twaddle, Which It Often Really Was.

The Church Is A House With A Hundred Gates: And No Two Men Enter At Exactly The Same Angle

Before The Roman Came To Rye Or Out To Severn Strode, / The Rolling English Drunkard Made The Rolling English Road.

The Real Pleasure-seeking Is The Combination Of Luxury And Austerity In Such A Way That The Luxury Can Really Be Felt.

Pleasure Seeking

Playing As Children Means Playing Is The Most Serious Thing In The World.

To Desire Money Is Much Nobler Than To Desire Success. Desiring Money May Mean Desiring To Return To Your Country, Or Marry The Woman You Love, Or Ransom Your Father From Brigands. But Desiring Success Must Mean That You Take An Abstract Pleasure In The Unbrotherly Act Of Distancing And Disgracing Other Men.

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.

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.

There Are No Uninteresting Things, Only Uninterested People.

A Great Man Is Not A Man So Strong That He Feels Less Than Other Men; He Is A Man So Strong That He Feels More.

There Is, Therefore, About All Complete Conviction A Kind Of Huge Helplessness.

We Need To Be Reminded More Than We Need To Be Instructed

Free Verse Is Like Free Love; It Is A Contradiction In Terms.

Silver Is Sometimes More Valuable Than Gold, That Is, In Large Quantities.

The World Will Very Soon Be Divided, Unless I Am Mistaken, Into Those Who Still Go On Explaining Our Success, And Those Somewhat More Intelligent Who Are Trying To Explain Our Failure.

The Reason That Angels Fly Is That They Take Themselves So Lightly.

No Man Who Worships Education Has Got The Best Out Of Education... Without A Gentle Contempt For Education No Man's Education Is Complete.

Indeed The Book Of Job Avowedly Only Answers Mystery With Mystery. Job Is Comforted With Riddles; But He Is Comforted. Herein Is Indeed A Type, In The Sense Of A Prophecy, Of Things Speaking With Authority. For When He Who Doubts Can Only Say, ‘i Do Not Understand,’ It Is True That He Who Knows Can Only Reply Or Repeat ‘you Do Not Understand.’ And Under That Rebuke There Is Always A Sudden Hope In The Heart; And The Sense Of Something That Would Be Worth Understanding.

Youth Is The Period In Which A Man Can Be Hopeless. The End Of Every Episode Is The End Of The World. But The Power Of Hoping Through Everything, The Knowledge That The Soul Survives Its Adventures, That Great Inspiration Comes To The Middle-aged.

Every True Artist Does Feel, Consciously Or Unconsciously, That He Is Touching Transcendental Truths; That His Images Are Shadows Of Things Seen Through The Veil. In Other Words, The Natural Mystic Does Know That There Is Something There, Something Behind The Clouds Or Within The Trees; But He Believes That The Pursuit Of Beauty Is The Way To Find It; That Imagination Is A Sort Of Incantation That Can Call It Up.

We're All In The Same Boat, And We're All Seasick.

What Life And Death May Be To A Turkey Is Not My Business; But The Soul Of Scrooge And The Body Of Cratchit Are My Business.

Acceptance Is The Truest Kinship With Humanity.

The Most Extraordinary Thing In The World Is An Ordinary Man And An Ordinary Woman And Their Ordinary Children.

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.

The Devil's Walking Parody; On All Four-footed Things.

It Is Very Foolish Of A Man To Be Frightened Of A Skeleton, For Nature Has Put An Insurmountable Obstacle Against Running Away From It.

...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.

For They (capitalists) Hold As Their Chief Heresy, In A Coarser Form, The Fundamental Falsehood That Things Are Not Made To Be Used But Made To Be Sold. All The Collapse Of Their Commercial System In Their Own Time Has Been Due To That Fallacy Of Forcing Things On A Market Where There Was No Market; Of Continually Increasing The Power Of Supply Without Increasing The Power Of Demand; Of Briefly, Of Always Considering The Man Who Sells The Potato And Never Considering The Man Who Eats It.

. . . For Friendship Implies Individuality; Whereas Comradeship Really Implies The Temporary Subordination, If Not The Temporary Swamping Of Individuality. Friends Are The Better For Being Two; But Comrades Are The Better For Being Two Million.

If A Man Called Christmas Day A Mere Hypocritical Excuse For Drunkenness And Gluttony, That Would Be False, But It Would Have A Fact Hidden In It Somewhere. But When Bernard Shaw Says The Christmas Day Is Only A Conspiracy Kept Up By Poulterers And Wine Merchants From Strictly Business Motives, Then He Says Something Which Is Not So Much False As Startling And Arrestingly Foolish. He Might As Well Say That The Two Sexes Were Invented By Jewellers Who Wanted To Sell Wedding Rings.

All Literary Style, Especially National Style, Is Made Up Of Such Coincidences, Which Are A Spiritual Sort Of Puns. That Is Why Style Is Untranslatable.

We Can Be Almost Certain Of Being Wrong About The Future, If We Are Wrong About The Past.

Gluttony Is A Great Fault; But We Do Not Necessarily Dislike A Glutton. We Only Dislike The Glutton When He Becomes A Gourmet-that Is, We Only Dislike Him When He Not Only Wants The Best For Himself, But Knows What Is Best For Other People.

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 The Same Kind Of Obligation To These Creatures That A Deity Might Feel...

If We Desire European Civilization To Be A Raid And A Rescue, We Shall Insist Rather That Souls Are In Real Peril Than That Their Peril Is Ultimately Unreal. And If We Wish To Exalt The Outcast And The Crucified, We Shall Rather Wish To Think That A Veritable God Was Crucified, Rather Than A Mere Sage Or Hero. Above All, If We Wish To Protect The Poor We Shall Be In Favour Of Fixed Rules And Clear Dogmas. The Rules Of A Club Are Occasionally In Favour Of The Poor Member. The Drift Of A Club Is Always In Favour Of The Rich One.

Thieves Respect Property. They Merely Wish The Property To Become Their Property That They May More Perfectly Respect It.

Nobody Notices Postmen, Yet They Have Passions Like Other Men.

To Do Mohammed Justice, His Main Attack Was Against The Idolatries Of Asia. Only He Thought, Just As The Arians Did And Just As The Unitarians Do, That He Could Attack Them Better With A Greater Approximation To Plain Theism. What Distinguishes His Heresy From Anything Like An Arian Or Albigensian Heresy Is That, As It Sprang Up On The Borders Of Christendom, It Could Spread Outwards To A Barbaric World.

Modern Science Is Necessarily A Double-edged Tool, A Tool That Cuts Both Ways. ... There Is No Doubt That A Zeppelin Is A Wonderful Thing; But That Did Not Prevent It From Becoming A Horrible Thing.

Why Are We Not Grateful To God For Filling Our Stockings With Legs?

The Oligarchic Character Of The Modern English Commonwealth Does Not Rest, Like Many Oligarchies, On The Cruelty Of The Rich To The Poor. It Does Not Even Rest On The Kindness Of The Rich To The Poor. It Rests On The Perennial And Unfailing Kindness Of The Poor To The Rich.

It Is Assumed That The Skeptic Has No Bias; Whereas He Has A Very Obvious Bias In Favour Of Skepticism.

Religious Liberty Might Be Supposed To Mean That Everybody Is Free To Discuss Religion. In Practice It Means That Hardly Anybody Is Allowed To Mention It.

Pride Consists In A Man Making His Personality The Only Test, Instead Of Making Truth The Test. The Sceptic Feels Himself Too Large To Measure Life By The Largest Things; And Ends By Measuring It By The Smallest Thing Of All.

Moral Issues Are Always Terribly Complex For Someone Without Principles.

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.

The Point Is Not That This World Is Too Sad To Love Or Too Glad Not To Love; The Point Is That When You Do Love A Thing, Its Gladness Is A Reason For Loving It, And Its Sadness A Reason For Loving It More.

The Supreme Adventure Is Being Born. There We Do Walk Suddenly Into A Splendid And Startling Trap... When We Step Into The Family, By The Act Of Being Born, We Do Step Into A World Which Is Incalculable, Into A World Which Has Its Own Strange Laws, Into A World Which Could Do Without Us, Into A World We Have Not Made. In Other Words, When We Step Into The Family We Step Into A Fairy-tale.

It Is Ludicrous To Suppose That The More Sceptical We Are The More We See Good In Everything. It Is Clear That The More We Are Certain What Good Is, The More We Shall See Good In Everything.

Your Next-door Neighbor Is Not A Man; He Is An Environment. He Is The Barking Of A Dog; He Is The Noise Of A Piano; He Is A Dispute About A Party Wall; He Is Drains That Are Worse Than Yours, Or Roses That Are Better Than Yours.

No Man's Really Any Good Till He Knows How Bad He Is, Or Might Be.

It Is Because Artists Do Not Practise, Patrons Do Not Patronize, Crowds Do Not Assemble To Reverently Worship The Great Work Of Doing Nothing, That The World Has Lost Its Philosophy And Even Failed To Invent A New Religion.

It Isn't That They Can't See The Solution. It's That They Can't See The Problem. They Can't See The Problem If They Are Looking In The Wrong Place. They Can't See The Problem If They Have Blinders On - For 'none Are So Blind As Those That Will Not See'.

I Despise Birth-control First Because It Is ... An Entirely Meaningless Word; And Is Used So As To Curry Favour Even With Those Who Would First Recoil From Its Real Meaning. The Proceeding These Quack Doctors Recommend Does Not Control Any Birth.

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.

Feminists Are Those Who Cannot Stand Female Characteristics.

Characteristics

We Are Like The Penny, Because We Have The Image Of The King Stamped On Us, The Divine King.

I Suppose Every One Must Have Reflected How Primeval And How Poetical Are The Things That One Carries In One's Pocket; The Pocket-knife, For Instance, The Type Of All Human Tools, The Infant Of The Sword. Once I Planned To Write A Book Of Poems Entirely About Things In My Pockets. But I Found It Would Be Too Long; And The Age Of The Great Epics Is Past.

...it's Natural To Believe In The Supernatural. It Never Feels Natural To Accept Only Natural Things.

Christianity Satisfies Suddenly And Perfectly Man's Ancestral Instinct For Being The Right Way Up; Satisfies It Supremely In This, That By Its Creed Joy Becomes Something Gigantic, And Sadness Something Special And Small.

It Is Much Easier To Write A Good Times Leading Article Than A Good Joke In Punch.

Man Is Always Something Worse Or Something Better Than An Animal; And A Mere Argument From Animal Perfection Never Touches Him At All. Thus, In Sex No Animal Is Either Chivalrous Or Obscene. And Thus No Animal Invented Anything So Bad As Drunkeness - Or So Good As Drink.

Even The Moon Is Only Poetical Because There Is A Man In The Moon.

Man In The Moon

There Is Only One Thing That It Requires Real Courage To Say, And That Is A Truism.

In The Modern Conflict Between The Smile And The Laugh, I Am All In Favor Of Laughing. The Recent Stage Of Culture And Criticism Might Very Well Be Summed Up As The Men Who Smile Criticizing The Men Who Laugh.

Faith Is Always At A Disadvantage; It Is A Perpetually Defeated Thing Which Survives All Conquerors.

A Large Section Of The Intelligentsia Seems Wholly Devoid Of Intelligence.

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.

A Good Moslem King Was One Who Was Strict In Religion, Valiant In Battle, Just In Giving Judgment Among His People, But Not One Who Had The Slightest Objection In International Matters To Removing His Neighbour's Landmark.

An Enormous Amount Of Modern Ingenuity Is Expended On Finding Defences For The Indefensible Conduct Of The Powerful. As I Have Said Above, These Defences Generally Exhibit Themselves Most Emphatically In The Form Of Appeals To Physical Science. And Of All The Forms In Which Science, Or Pseudo-science, Has Come To The Rescue Of The Rich And Stupid, There Is None So Singular As The Singular Invention Of The Theory Of Races.

If The Common Man In The Past Had A Grave Respect For Property, It May Conceivably Have Been Because He Sometimes Had Some Of His Own.

But Those Dealing In The Actual Manufacture Of Mind Are Dealing In A Very Explosive Material. The Material Is Not Merely The Clay Of Which Man Is Master, But The Truths Or Semblances Of Truth Which Have A Certain Mastery Over Man. The Material Is Explosive Because It Must Be Taken Seriously. The Men Writing Books Really Are Throwing Bombs.

The One Stream Of Poetry Which Is Continually Flowing Is Slang.

Savages And Modern Artists Are Alike Strangely Driven To Create Something Uglier Than Themselves. But The Artists Find It Harder.

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.

An Imbecile Habit Has Arisen In Modern Controversy Of Saying That Such And Such A Creed Can Be Held In One Age But Cannot Be Held In Another. Some Dogma, We Are Told, Was Credible In The Twelfth Century, But Is Not Credible In The Twentieth. You Might As Well Say That A Certain Philosophy Can Be Believed On Mondays, But Cannot Be Believed On Tuesdays. You Might As Well Say Of A View Of The Cosmos That It Was Suitable To Half-past Three, But Not Suitable To Half-past Four. What A Man Can Believe Depends Upon His Philosophy, Not Upon The Clock Or The Century.

Nine Out Of Ten Of What We Call New Ideas Are Simply Old Mistakes.

Dogma Does Not Mean The Absence Of Thought, But The End Of Thought.

What Embitters The World Is Not Excess Of Criticism, But Absence Of Self-criticism.

There Is Only One Thing That Stands In Our Midst, Attenuated And Threatened, But Enthroned In Some Power Like A Ghost Of The Middle Ages: The Trade Unions.

There Are Many Books Which We Think We Have Read When We Have Not. There Are, At Least, Many That We Think We Remember When We Do Not. An Original Picture Was, Perhaps, Imprinted Upon The Brain, But It Has Changed With Our Own Changing Minds. We Only Remember Our Remembrance.

All That We Call Spirit And Art And Ecstacy Only Means That For One Awful Instant We Remember That We Forgot.

Modern Man Is Staggering And Losing His Balance Because He Is Being Pelted With Little Pieces Of Alleged Fact Which Are Native To The Newspapers; And, If They Turn Out Not To Be Facts, That Is Still More Native To Newspapers.

I Came To The Conclusion That The Optimist Thought Everything Good Except The Pessimist, And That The Pessimist Thought Everything Bad, Except Himself.

Mysticism Keeps Mankind Sane. As Long As You Have Mystery You Have Health; When You Destroy Mystery You Create Morbidity.

The More I Considered Christianity, The More I Found That While It Had Established A Rule And Order, The Chief Aim Of That Order Was To Give Room For Good Things To Run Wild.

Large Organization Is Loose Organization. Nay, It Would Be Almost As True To Say That Organization Is Always Disorganization.

What Is The Good Of Telling A Community That It Has Every Liberty Except The Liberty To Make Laws? The Liberty To Make Laws Is What Constitutes A Free People.

If Man Is Not The Image Of God, Then He Is A Disease Of The Dust.

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.

The Obvious Effect Of Frivolous Divorce Will Be Frivolous Marriage. If People Can Be Separated For No Reason They Will Feel It All The Easier To Be United For No Reason.

Doing Nothing Is Sometimes One Of The Highest Of The Duties Of Man.

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.

And It Did For One Wild Moment Cross My Mind That, Perhaps, Those Might Not Be The Very Best Judges Of The Relation Of Religion To Happiness Who, By Their Own Account, Had Neither One Nor The Other.

None Of The Modern Machines, None Of The Modern Paraphernalia. . . Have Any Power Except Over The People Who Choose To Use Them.

I Would Not Say That Old Men Grow Wise, For Men Never Grow Wise; And Many Old Men Retain A Very Attractive Childishness And Cheerful Innocence. Elderly People Are Often Much More Romantic Than Younger People, And Sometimes Even More Adventurous, Having Begun To Realize How Many Things They Do Not Know.

The Sceptic Ultimately Undermines Democracy (1) Because He Can See No Significance In Death And Such Things Of A Literal Equality; (2) Because He Introduces Different First Principles, Making Debate Impossible: And Debate Is The Life Of Democracy; (3) Because The Fading Of The Images Of Sacred Persons Leaves A Man Too Prone To Be A Respecter Of Earthly Persons; (4) Because There Will Be More, Not Less, Respect For Human Rights If They Can Be Treated As Divine Rights.

Christianity Got Over The Difficulty Of Combining Furious Opposites, By Keeping Them Both, And Keeping Them Both Furious.

There Are Two Kinds Of Peacemakers In The Modern World; And They Are Both, Though In Various Ways, A Nuisance. The First Peacemaker Is The Man Who Goes About Saying That He Agrees With Everybody. He Confuses Everybody. The Second Peacemaker Is The Man Who Goes About Saying That Everybody Agrees With Him. He Enrages Everybody. Between The Two Of Them They Produce A Hundred Times More Disputes And Distractions Than We Poor Pugnacious People Would Ever Have Thought Of In Our Lives.

The Believers In Miracles Accept Them (rightly Or Wrongly) Because They Have Evidence For Them. The Disbelievers In Miracles Deny Them (rightly Or Wrongly) Because They Have A Doctrine Against Them.

And We Were Angry And Poor And Happy, And Proud Of Seeing Our Names In Print.

It Is Very Good For A Man To Talk About What He Does Not Understand; As Long As He Understands That He Does Not Understand It.

One Of The Chief Uses Of Religion Is That It Makes Us Remember Our Coming From Darkness, The Simple Fact That We Are Created.

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.

Modern Broad-mindedness Benefits The Rich; And Benefits Nobody Else.

Half A Truth Is Better Than No Politics.

Every Man Is Important If He Loses His Life;and Every Man Is Funny If He Loses His Hat And Has To Run After It.

A Faith Is That Which Is Able To Survive A Mood.

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 Modern World... Has No Notion Except That Of Simplifying Something By Destroying Nearly Everything.

The Average Woman Is At The Head Of Something With Which She Can Do As She Likes; The Average Man Has To Obey Orders And Do Nothing Else.

If I Can Put One Touch Of Rosy Sunset Into The Life Of Any Man Or Woman, I Shall Feel That I Have Worked With God.

All Men Thirst To Confess Their Crimes More Than Tired Beasts Thirst For Water; But They Naturally Object To Confessing Them While Other People, Who Have Also Committed The Same Crimes, Sit By And Laugh At Them.

Comradeship Is Obvious And Universal And Open; But It Is Only One Kind Of Affection; It Has Characteristics That Would Destroy Any Other Kind. Anyone Who Has Known True Comradeship In A Club Or In A Regiment, Knows That It Is Impersonal.

To Mix Science Up With Philosophy Is Only To Produce A Philosophy That Has Lost All Its Ideal Value And A Science That Has Lost All Its Practical Value. It Is For My Private Physician To Tell Me Whether This Or That Food Will Kill Me. It Is For My Private Philosopher To Tell Me Whether I Ought To Be Killed.

Men In England Are Ruled, At This Minute By The Clock, By Brutes Who Refuse Them Bread, By Liars Who Refuse Them News, And By Fools Who Cannot Govern, And Therefore Wish To Enslave.

We Do Not Need A Censorship Of The Press. We Have A Censorship By The Press... It Is Not We Who Silence The Press. It Is The Press Who Silences Us.

The Telescope Makes The World Smaller; It Is Only The Microscope That Makes It Larger.

Sticking To One Woman Is A Small Price To Pay For So Much As Having Seen One Woman.

How Much Larger Your Life Would Be If You Were Smaller In It.

Christian Inspirational

Students Of Popular Science... Are Always Insisting That Christianity And Buddhism Are Very Much Alike, Especially Buddhism. This Is Generally Believed, And I Believed It Myself Until I Read A Book Giving The Reasons For It.

Powerful Men Who Have Powerful Passions Use Much Of Their Strength In Forging Chains For Themselves.

There Are Those Who Hate Christianity And Call Their Hatred An All-embracing Love For All Religions.

If There Is A God

Christian Inspirational

The Full Value Of This Life Can Only Be Got By Fighting; The Violent Take It By Storm. And If We Have Accepted Everything We Have Missed Something - War. This Life Of Ours Is A Very Enjoyable Fight, But A Very Miserable Truce.

Blasphemy Is An Artistic Effect, Because Blasphemy Depends Upon A Philosophical Conviction. Blasphemy Depends Upon Belief And Is Fading With It. If Any One Doubts This, Let Him Sit Down Seriously And Try To Think Blasphemous Thoughts About Thor.

According To Most Philosophers, God In Making The World Enslaved It. According To Christianity, In Making It, He Set It Free. God Had Written, Not So Much A Poem, But Rather A Play; A Play He Had Planned As Perfect, But Which Had Necessarily Been Left To Human Actors And Stage-managers, Who Had Since Made A Great Mess Of It.

The Aim Of Life Is Appreciation; There Is No Sense In Not Appreciating Things; And There Is No Sense In Having More Of Them If You Have Less Appreciation Of Them.

With All That We Hear Of American Hustle And Hurry, It Is Rather Strange That Americans Seem To Like To Linger On Longer Words.

Thoughts On The Merits Of Work The Worst Of Work Nowadays Is What Happens To People When They Cease To Work.

And Though St. John Saw Many Strange Monsters In His Vision, He Saw No Creature So Wild As One Of His Own Commentators.

[no Society Can Survive The Socialist] Fallacy That There Is An Absolutely Unlimited Number Of Inspired Officials And An Absolutely Unlimited Amount Of Money To Pay Them.

Research Is The Search Of People Who Don't Know What They Want.

Every One On The Earth Should Believe That He Has Something To Give To The World Which Cannot Otherwise Be Given.

When You Have Really Exhausted An Experience You Always Reverence And Love It. The Two Things That Nearly All Of Us Have Thoroughly And Really Been Through Are Childhood And Youth. And Though We Would Not Have Them Back Again On Any Account, We Feel That They Are Both Beautiful, Because We Have Drunk Them Dry.

The Determining Bulk Of Scotch People Had Heard Of Golf Ever Since They Had Heard Of God And Often Considered The Two As Of Equal Importance.

The Perplexity Of Life Arises From There Being Too Many Interesting Things In It For Us To Be Interested Properly In Any Of Them.

Thanks Are The Highest Form Of Thought.

Buddhism Is Not A Creed, It Is A Doubt.

Man Knows That There Are In The Soul Tints More Bewildering, More Numberless, And More Nameless That The Colors Of An Autumn Forest....yet He Seriously Believes That These Things Can Every One Of Them , In All Their Tones And Semi-tones, In All Their Blends And Unions, Be Accurately Represented By An Arbitrary System Of Grunts And Squeals. He Believes That An Ordinary Civilized Stockbroker Can Really Produce Out Of His Own Inside Noises Which Denote All The Mysteries Of Memory And All The Agonies Of Desire.

The Comedy Of Man Survives The Tragedy Of Man.

Science Boasts Of The Distance Of Its Stars; Of The Terrific Remoteness Of The Things Of Which It Has To Speak. But Poetry And Religion Always Insist Upon The Proximity, The Almost Menacing Closeness Of The Things With Which They Are Concerned. Always The Kingdom Of Heaven Is "at Hand."

...i Will Praise The English Climate Till I Die—even If I Die Of The English Climate. There Is No Weather So Good As English Weather. Nay, In A Real Sense There Is No Weather At All Anywhere But In England. In France You Have Much Sun And Some Rain; In Italy You Have Hot Winds And Cold Winds; In Scotland And Ireland You Have Rain, Either Thick Or Thin; In America You Have Hells Of Heat And Cold, And In The Tropics You Have Sunstrokes Varied By Thunderbolts. But All These You Have On A Broad And Brutal Scale, And You Settle Down Into Contentment Or Despair.

Contemporary Society Has Become Dry, Not For Lack Of Wonders But For Lack Of Wonder.

Moderate Strength Is Shown In Violence, Supreme Strength Is Shown In Levity.

I Did Try To Found A Little Heresy Of My Own; And When I Had Put The Last Touches To It, I Discovered That It Was Orthodoxy.

The Great Ideals Of The Past Failed Not By Being Outlived (which Must Mean Over-lived), But By Not Being Lived Enough. Mankind Has Not Passed Through The Middle Ages. Rather Mankind Has Retreated From The Middle Ages In Reaction And Rout. The Christian Ideal Has Not Been Tried And Found Wanting. It Has Been Found Difficult And Left Untried.

These Are The Days When The Christian Is Expected To Praise Every Creed Except His Own.

Unless A Man Starts Afresh About Things, He Will Certainly Do Nothing Effective. Unless A Man Starts On The Strange Assumption That He Has Never Existed Before, It Is Quite Certain That He Will Never Exist Afterwards.

The Doctrine Of Human Equality Reposes On This: That There Is No Man Really Clever Who Has Not Found That He Is Stupid.

Oh, Most Unhappy Man,' He Cried, 'try To Be Happy! You Have Red Hair Like Your Sister.' My Red Hair, Like Red Flames, Shall Burn Up The World,' Said Gregory.

This Is The Age In Which Thin And Theoretic Minorities Can Cover And Conquer Unconscious And Untheoretic Majorities.

There Must Be Some Good In The Life Of Battle, For So Many Good Men Have Enjoyed Being Soldiers.

It Has Been Often 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.

Those Thinkers Who Cannot Believe In Any Gods Often Assert That The Love Of Humanity Would Be In Itself Sufficient For Them; And So, Perhaps, It Would, If They Had It.

Our Civilization Has Decided That Determining The Guilt Or Innocence Of Men Is A Thing Too Important To Be Trusted To Trained Men. When It Wants A Library Catalogued, Or The Solar System Discovered, Or Any Trifle Of That Kind, It Uses Up Its Specialists. But When It Wishes Anything Done Which Is Really Serious, It Collects Twelve Of The Ordinary Men Standing Round. The Same Thing Was Done, If I Remember Right, By The Founder Of Christianity.

It Is The Root Of All Religion That A Man Knows That He Is Nothing In Order To Thank God That He Is Something.

My Attitude Toward Progress Has Passed From Antagonism To Boredom. I Have Long Ceased To Argue With People Who Prefer Thursday To Wednesday Because It Is Thursday.

The Grinding Power Of The Plain Words Of The Gospel Story Is Like The Power Of Mill-stones, And Those Who Can Read Them Simply Enough Will Feel As If Rocks Had Been Rolled Upon Them.

One May Understand The Cosmos, But Never The Ego; The Self Is More Distant Than Any Star.

Who Would Condescend To Strike Down The Mere Things That He Does Not Fear? Who Would Debase Himself To Be Merely Brave, Like Any Common Prizefighter? Who Would Stoop To Be Fearless--like A Tree? Fight The Thing That You Fear. You Remember The Old Tale Of The English Clergyman Who Gave The Last Rites To The Brigand Of Sicily, And How On His Death-bed The Great Robber Said, 'i Can Give You No Money, But I Can Give You Advice For A Lifetime: Your Thumb On The Blade, And Strike Upwards.' So I Say To You, Strike Upwards, If You Strike At The Stars.

A Man Running After A Hat Is Not Half So Ridiculous As A Man Running After A Woman.

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.

And They That Rule In England, In Stately Conclaves Met, Alas, Alas For England They Have No Graves As Yet.

'as You Have Made Your Bed, So You Must Lie On It'; Which Again Is Simply A Lie. If I Have Made My Bed Uncomfortable, Please God I Will Make It Again.

The Pure Modernist Is Merely A Snob; He Cannot Bear To Be A Month Behind The Fashion.

I Like The Cyclostyle Ink; It Is So Inky. I Do Not Think There Is Anyone Who Takes Quite Such A Fierce Pleasure In Things Being Themselves As I Do. The Startling Wetness Of Water Excites And Intoxicates Me: The Fieriness Of Fire, The Steeliness Of Steel, The Unutterable Muddiness Of Mud. It Is Just The Same With People.... When We Call A Man "manly" Or A Woman "womanly" We Touch The Deepest Philosophy.

There Is The Great Lesson Of 'beauty And The Beast,' That A Thing Must Be Loved Before It Is Lovable.

If An Editor Can Only Make People Angry Enough, They Will Write Half His Newspaper For Him For Nothing.

In Real Life The People Who Are Most Bigoted Are The People Who Have No Convictions At All.

Surely We Cannot Take An Open Question Like The Supernatural And Shut It With A Bang, Turning The Key Of The Madhouse On All The Mystics Of History. You Cannot Take The Region Of The Unknown And Calmly Say That, Though You Know Nothing About It, You Know All The Gates Are Locked. We Do Not Know Enough About The Unknown To Know That It Is Unknowable.

Customs Are Generally Unselfish. Habits Are Nearly Always Selfish.

People In High Life Are Hardened To The Wants And Distresses Of Mankind As Surgeons Are To Their Bodily Pains.

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.

The Poor Have Sometimes Objected To Being Governed Badly; The Rich Have Always Objected To Being Governed At All.

Once Abolish The God, And The Government Becomes The God.

The Aesthete Aims At Harmony Rather Than Beauty. If His Hair Does Not Match The Mauve Sunset Against Which He Is Standing, He Hurriedly Dyes His Hair Another Shade Of Mauve. If His Wife Does Not Go With The Wall-paper, He Gets A Divorce.

As An Explanation Of The World Materialism Has A Sort Of Insane Simplicity. It Has The Quality Of A Madman's Arguments; We Have At Once The Sense Of It Covering Everything And The Sense Of It Leaving Everything Out.

The Mind That Finds Its Way To Wild Places Is The Poet's; But The Mind That Never Finds Its Way Back Is The Lunatic's.

The Whole Pleasure Of Marriage Is That It Is A Perpetual Crisis.

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