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The Sincere Love Of Books Has Nothing To Do With Cleverness Or Stupidity Any More Than Any Other Sincere Love. It Is A Quality Of Character, A Freshness, A Power Of Pleasure, A Power Of Faith. A Silly Person May Delight In Reading Masterpieces Just As A Silly Person May Delight In Picking Flowers. A Fool May Be In Love With A Poet As He May Be In Love With A Woman.

-Gilbert K. Chesterton

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The Sincere Love Of

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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The Sincere Love Of Books Has Nothing To Do With Cleverness Or Stupidity Any More Than Any Other Sincere Love. It Is A Quality Of Character, A Freshness, A Power Of Pleasure, A Power Of Faith. A Silly Person May Delight In Reading Masterpieces Just As A Silly Person May Delight In Picking Flowers. A Fool May Be In Love With A Poet As He May Be In Love With A Woman.

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Sometimes He Even Embarrassed The Company By Phrases Suggesting That There Was Some Difference Between A Liberal And A Conservative.

We Are Justified In Enforcing Good Morals, For They Belong To All Mankind; But We Are Not Justified In Enforcing Good Manners, For Good Manners Always Mean Our Own Manners.

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.

But Pure Wit Is Akin To Puritanism; To The Perfect And Painful Consciousness Of The Final Fact In The Universe. Very Briefly, The Man Who Sees The Consistency In Things Is A Wit - And A Calvinist. The Man Who Sees The Inconsistency In Things Is A Humorist - And A Catholic.

The Reformer Is Always Right About What's Wrong. However, He's Often Wrong About What Is Right.

Morality Did Not Begin By One Man Saying To Another, "i Will Not Hit You If You Do Not Hit Me"; There Is No Trace Of Such A Transaction. There Is A Trace Of Both Men Having Said, "we Must Not Hit Each Other In The Holy Place.

There Is Nothing Harder To Learn Than Painting And Nothing Which Most People Take Less Trouble About Learning.

One Sees Great Things From The Valley; Only Small Things From The Peak.

A Tragedy Means Always A Mans Struggle With That Which Is Stronger Than Man.

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.

The Wisest Thing In The World Is To Cry Out Before You Are Hurt. It Is No Good To Cry Out After You Are Hurt; Especially After You Are Mortally Hurt. People Talk About The Impatience Of The Populace; But Sound Historians Know That Most Tyrannies Have Been Possible Because Men Moved Too Late. It Is Often Essential To Resist A Tyranny Before It Exists.

Democracy Means Government By The Uneducated, While Aristocracy Means Government By The Badly Educated.

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.

Literature And Fiction Are Two Entirely Different Things. Literature Is A Luxury; Fiction Is A Necessity.

The Central Idea Of Poetry Is The Idea Of Guessing Right, Like A Child.

Big Business And State Socialism Are Very Much Alike, Especially Big Business.

There Are Two Kinds Of Rebellion. The First Is One In Which The Slave Demands Something That The Tyrant Has Got. The Second Is One In Which He Demands Something That The Tyrant Has Not Got.

Facts As Facts Do Not Always Create A Spirit Of Reality, Because Reality Is A Spirit.

Gratitude Is Happiness Doubled By Wonder.

The Man Of The True Religious Tradition Understands Two Things: Liberty And Obedience. The First Means Knowing What You Really Want. The Second Means Knowing What You Really Trust.

Courage Is Almost A Contradiction In Terms. It Means A Strong Desire To Live Taking The Form Of Readiness To Die.

A Good Joke Is The Closest Thing We Have To Divine Revelation.

Divine Revelation

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.

A Detective Story Generally Describes Six Living Men Discussing How It Is That A Man Is Dead. A Modern Philosophic Story Generally Describes Six Dead Men Discussing How Any Man Can Possibly Be Alive.

I Think The Oddest Thing About The Advanced People Is That, While They Are Always Talking About Things As Problems, They Have Hardly Any Notion Of What A Real Problem Is.

The True Savage Is A Slave, And Is Always Talking About What He Must Do; The True Civilised Man Is A Free Man, And Is Always Talking About What He May Do.

I Regard Golf As An Expensive Way Of Playing Marbles.

The Coziness Between Church And State Is Good For The State And Bad For The Church

Church And State

The Purpose Of Compulsory Education Is To Deprive The Common People Of Their Commonsense.

It Is A Mathematical Fact That If A Line Be Not Perfectly Directed Towards A Point, It Will Actually Go Further Away From It As It Comes Nearer To It.

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.

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.

Every One On This Earth Should Believe, Amid Whatever Madness Or Moral Failure, That His Life And Temperament Have Some Object On The Earth. Every One On The Earth Should Believe That He Has Something To Give To The World Which Cannot Otherwise Be Given.

We Should Thank God For Beer And Burgundy By Not Drinking Too Much Of Them.

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.

Democracy Is Like Blowing Your Nose. You May Not Do It Well, But It's Something You Ought To Do Yourself.

The Best Way That A Man Could Test His Readiness To Encounter The Common Variety Of Mankind Would Be To Climb Down A Chimney Into Any House At Random, And Get On As Well As Possible With The People Inside. And That Is Essentially What Each One Of Us Did On The Day That He Was Born.

Family Is The Theatre Of The Spiritual Drama, The Place Where Things Happen, Especially The Things That Matter.

The Artistic Temperament Is A Disease That Afflicts Amateurs. It Is A Disease Which Arises From Men No Having Sufficient Power Of Expression To Utter And Get Rid Of The Element Of Art In Their Being.

If There Were No God, There Would Be No Atheists.

Christian Inspirational

Journalism Largely Consists Of Saying 'lord Jones Is Dead' To People Who Never Knew That Lord Jones Was Alive.

I Had Always Felt Life First As A Story: And If There Is A Story There Is A Story-teller

I Never Said A Word Against Eminent Men Of Science. What I Complain Of Is A Vague Popular Philosophy Which Supposes Itself To Be Scientific When It Is Really Nothing But A Sort Of New Religion And An Uncommonly Nasty One. When People Talked About The Fall Of Man, They Knew They Were Talking About A Mystery, A Thing They Didn't Understand. Now They Talk About The Survival Of The Fittest: They Think They Do Understand It, Whereas They Have Not Merely No Notion, They Have An Elaborately False Notion Of What The Words Mean.

For The Mass Of Men The Idea Of Artistic Creation Can Only Be Expressed By An Idea Unpopular In Present Discussions - The Idea Of Property... Property Is Merely The Art Of The Democracy... One Would Think, To Hear People Talk, That The Rothschilds And The Rockefellers Were On The Side Of Property. But Obviously They Are The Enemies Of Property; Because They Are Enemies Of Their Own Limitations.

Catholicism Is Not Ritualism; It May In The Future Be Fighting Some Sort Of Superstitious And Idolatrous Exaggeration Of Ritual. Catholicism Is Not Asceticism; It Has Again And Again In The Past Repressed Fanatical And Cruel Exaggerations Of Asceticism. Catholicism Is Not Mere Mysticism; It Is Even Now Defending Human Reason Against The Mere Mysticism Of The Pragmatists.

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.

There Is No Such Thing On Earth As An Uninteresting Subject; The Only Thing That Can Exist Is An Uninterested Person.

Artistic Temperament

Making The Landlord And The Tenant The Same Person Has Certain Advantages, As That The Tenant Pays No Rent, While The Landlord Does A Little Work.

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.

Christianity Has Not Been Tried And Found Wanting; It Has Been Found Difficult And Not Tried.

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

Happiness Is A Mystery, Like Religion, And Should Never Be Rationalised.

Hope Means Expectancy When Things Are Otherwise Hopeless.

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

The Criminal Is The Creative Artist; The Detective Only The Critic.

It Is As Healthy To Enjoy Sentiment As To Enjoy Jam.

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.

The Most Valuable Book We Can Read, About Countries We Have Visited, Is That Which Recalls To Us Something That We Did Notice, But Did Not Notice That We Noticed.

You!" He Cried. "you Never Hated Because You Never Lived. I Know What You Are All Of You, From First To Last--you Are The People In Power! You Are The Police--the Great, Fat Smiling Men In Blue And Buttons! You Are The Law, And You Have Never Been Broken. But Is There A Free Soul Alive That Does Not Long To Break You, Only Because You Have Never Been Broken?

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.

Misers Get Up Early In The Morning; And Burglars, I Am Informed, Get Up The Night Before.

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.

There Are Arguments For Atheism, And They Do Not Depend, And Never Did Depend, Upon Science. They Are Arguable Enough, As Far As They Go, Upon A General Survey Of Life; Only It Happens To Be A Superficial Survey Of Life.

People Seem To Fight About Things Very Unsuitable For Fighting. They Make A Frightful Noise In Support Of Very Quiet Things. They Knock Each Other About In The Name Of Very Fragile Things.

Excuse Me If I Enjoy Myself Rather Obviously! I Don't Often Have The Luck To Have A Dream Like This. It Is New To Me For A Nightmare To Lead Me To A Lobster. It Is Commonly The Other Way.

The Greatest Political Storm Flutters Only A Fringe Of Humanity. But An Ordinary Man And An Ordinary Woman And Their Ordinary Children Literally Alter The Destiny Of Nations.

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

It Was Not The House That Grew Dull, But I That Grew Dull In It. My Wife Was Better Than All Women, And Yet I Could Not Feel It.

The Artistic Temperament Is A Disease That Affects Amateurs. Artists Of A Large And Wholesome Vitality Get Rid Of Their Art Easily, As They Breathe Easily Or Perspire Easily. But In Artists Of Less Force, The Thing Becomes A Pressure, And Produces A Definite Pain, Which Is Called The Artistic Temperament.

Well, If I Am Not Drunk, I Am Mad," Replied Syme With Perfect Calm; "but I Trust I Can Behave Like A Gentleman In Either Condition.

If You Spell A Word Wrong You Have Some Temptation To Think It Wrong.

No Animal Ever Invented Anything As Bad As Drunkenness - Or So Good As Drink.

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.

Too Much Capitalism Does Not Mean Too Many Capitalists, But Too Few Capitalists.

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.

Do Not Be So Open-minded That Your Brains Fall Out.

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.

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.

How Can It Be A Large Career To Tell Other People's Children About The Rule Of Three, And A Small Career To Tell One's Own Children About The Universe? How Can It Be Broad To Be The Same Thing To Everyone, And Narrow To Be Everything To Someone? No; A Woman's Function Is Laborious, But Because It Is Gigantic, Not Because It Is Minute. I Will Pity Mrs. Jones For The Hugeness Of Her Task; I Will Never Pity Her For Its Smallness.

Progress Is The Mother Of All Problems.

Those Who Leave The Tradition Of Truth Do Not Escape Into Something Which We Call Freedom. They Only Escape Into Something Else, Which We Call Fashion.

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.

The More We Are Proud That The Bethlehem Story Is Plain Enough To Be Understood By The Shepherds, And Almost By The Sheep, The More Do We Let Ourselves Go, In Dark And Gorgeous Imaginative Frescoes Or Pageants About The Mystery And Majesty Of The Three Magian Kings.

The Timidity Of The Child Or The Savage Is Entirely Reasonable; They Are Alarmed At This World, Because This World Is A Very Alarming Place. They Dislike Being Alone Because It Is Verily And Indeed An Awful Idea To Be Alone. Barbarians Fear The Unknown For The Same Reason That Agnostics Worship It - Because It Is A Fact.

I Never Could See Anything Wrong In Sensationalism; And I Am Sure Our Society Is Suffering More From Secrecy Than From Flamboyant Revelations.

As Long As The Vision Of Heaven Is Always Changing, The Vision Of Earth Will Be Exactly The Same. No Ideal Will Remain Long Enough To Be Realized, Or Even Partly Realized. The Modern Young Man Will Never Change His Environment; For He Will Always Change His Mind.

Coincidences Are Spiritual Puns.

If There Is One Thing Worse Than The Modern Weakening Of Major Morals, It Is The Modern Strengthening Of Minor Morals.

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.

In The End It Will Not Matter To Us Whether We Wrote Well Or Ill; Whether We Fought With Flails Or Reeds. It Will Matter To Us Greatly On What Side We Fought.

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.

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.

Stick To The Man Who Looks Out Of The Window And Tries To Understand The World. Keep Clear Of The Man Who Looks In At The Window And Tries To Understand You.

How You Think When You Lose Determines How Long It Will Be Until You Win.

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

The Sceptics, Like Bees, Give Their One Sting And Die.

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

Hope Is The Power Of Being Cheerful In Circumstances Which We Know To Be Desperate.

A Society Is In Decay, Final Or Transitional, When Common Sense Really Becomes Uncommon.

When A Person Has Found Something Which He Prefers To Life Itself, He For The First Time Has Begun To Live.

It Is Always The Secure Who Are Humble.

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.

He Is A [sane] Man Who Can Have Tragedy In His Heart And Comedy In His Head.

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.

Truth Can Understand Error, But Error Cannot Understand Truth.

Do Not Enjoy Yourself. Enjoy Dances And Theaters And Joy-rides And Champagne And Oysters; Enjoy Jazz And Cocktails And Night-clubs If You Can Enjoy Nothing Better; Enjoy Bigamy And Burglary And Any Crime In The Calendar, In Preference To The Other Alternative; But Never Learn To Enjoy Yourself.

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 Sort Of Man Who Admires Italian Art While Despising Italian Religion Is A Tourist And A Cad.

That Young Man With The Long, Auburn Hair And The Impudent Face - That Young Man Was Not Really A Poet; But Surely He Was A Poem.

Were Patrick Henry To Return To Earth And Look Around On The Vast Economic Order Of The Day, He Might Revise His Observation And Merely Say ‘give Me Death’-the Alternative Being Manifestly Impossible Under Modern Conditions.

Be Careful How You Suggest Things To Me. For There Is In Me A Madness Which Goes Beyond Martyrdom, The Madness Of An Utterly Idle Man.

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.

Men Did Not Love Rome Because She Was Great. She Was Great Because They Had Loved Her.

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.

A Great Classic Means A Man Whom One Can Praise Without Having Read.

A Building Is Akin To Dogma; It Is Insolent, Like Dogma. Whether Or No It Is Permanent, It Claims Permanence, Like A Dogma. People Ask Why We Have No Typical Architecture Of The Modern World, Like Impressionism In Painting. Surely It Is Obviously Because We Have Not Enough Dogmas; We Cannot Bear To See Anything In The Sky That Is Solid And Enduring, Anything In The Sky That Does Not Change Like The Clouds Of The Sky.

I Still Hold. . .that The Suburbs Ought To Be Either Glorified By Romance And Religion Or Else Destroyed By Fire From Heaven, Or Even By Firebrands From The Earth.

Business, Especially Big Business, Is Now Organized Like An Army. It Is, As Some Would Say, A Sort Of Mild Militarism Without Bloodshed; As I Say, A Militarism Without The Military Virtues.

Realism Is Simply Romanticism That Has Lost Its Reason...that Is Its Reason For Existing.

Chastity Does Not Mean Abstention From Sexual Wrong; It Means Something Flaming, Like Joan Of Arc.

People Wonder Why The Novel Is The Most Popular Form Of Literature; People Wonder Why It Is Read More Than Books Of Science Or Books Of Metaphysics. The Reason Is Very Simple; It Is Merely That The Novel Is More True Than They Are.

To Be Simple Is The Best Thing In The World; To Be Modest Is The Next Best Thing. I Am Not Sure About Being Quiet.

Ideas Are Dangerous, But The Man To Whom They Are Least Dangerous Is The Man Of Ideas. He Is Acquainted With Ideas, And Moves Among Them Like A Lion-tamer. Ideas Are Dangerous, But The Man To Whom They Are Most Dangerous Is The Man Of No Ideas. The Man Of No Ideas Will Find The First Idea Fly To His Head Like Wine To The Head Of A Teetotaller.

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.

One Must Somehow Find A Way Of Loving The World Without Trusting It; Somehow One Must Love The World Without Being Worldly.

We Are Christians And Catholics Not Because We Worship A Key, But Because We Have Passed A Door; And Felt The Wind That Is The Trumpet Of Liberty Blow Over The Land Of The Living.

English Experience Indicates That When The Two Great Political Parties Agree About Something It Is Generally Wrong.

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.

Tolerance Is A Virtue Of People Who Don't Believe In Anything Anymore.

There Is Less Difference Than Many Suppose Between The Ideal Socialist System, In Which The Big Businesses Are Run By The State, And The Present Capitalist System, In Which The State Is Run By The Big Businesses.

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

Children Are Simply Human Beings Who Are Allowed To Do What Everyone Else Really Desires To Do, As For Instance, To Fly Kites, Or When Seriously Wronged To Emit Prolonged Screams For Several Minutes.

We Do Not Need To Get Good Laws To Restrain Bad People. We Need To Get Good People To Restrain Us From Bad Laws.

If A Thing Is Worth Doing, It Is Worth Doing Badly.

The Word 'good' Has Many Meanings. For Example, If A Man Were To Shoot His Grandmother At A Range Of Five Hundred Yards, I Should Call Him A Good Shot, But Not Necessarily A Good Man.

Even A Bad Shot Is Dignified When He Accepts A Duel.

They Say Travel Broadens The Mind, But You Must Have The Mind.

Monotony Has Nothing To Do With A Place; Monotony, Either In Its Sensation Or Its Infliction, Is Simply The Quality Of A Person. There Are No Dreary Sights; There Are Only Dreary Sight Seers.

Man Is More Himself, Man Is More Manlike, When Joy Is The Fundamental Thing In Him, And Grief The Superficial. Melancholy Should Be An Innocent Interlude, A Tender And Fugitive Frame Of Mind; Praise Should Be The Permanent Pulsation Of The Soul.

The Danger Of Loss Of Faith In God Is Not That One Will Believe In Nothing, But Rather That One Will Believe In Anything.

People Decided That It Was Impossible To Achieve Any Of The Good Of Socialism, But They Comforted Themselves By Achieving All The Bad.

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

Only Man Can Be Absurd: For Only Man Can Be Dignified.

It Is Cold Anarchy To Say That All Men Are To Meddle In All Men'smarriages. It Is Cold Anarchy To Say That Any Doctor May Seize Andsegregate Anyone He Likes. But It Is Not Anarchy To Say That A Fewgreat Hygienists Might Enclose Or Limit The Life Of All Citizens,as Nurses Do With A Family Of Children. It Is Not Anarchy, It Istyranny; But Tyranny Is A Workable Thing.

If Christianity Should Happen To Be True - That Is To Say, If Its God Is The Real God Of The Universe - Then Defending It May Mean Talking About Anything And Everything.

The Scientific Facts, Which Were Supposed To Contradict The Faith In The Nineteenth Century, Are Nearly All Of Them Regarded As Unscientific Fictions In The Twentieth Century.

I Still Believe In Liberalism Today As Much As I Ever Did, But, Oh, There Was A Happy Time When I Believed In Liberals.

Life Is Serious All The Time, But Living Cannot Be. You May Have All The Solemnity You Wish In Your Neckties, But In Anything Important (such As Sex, Death, And Religion), You Must Have Mirth Or You Will Have Madness.

The Great Majority Of People Will Go On Observing Forms That Cannot Be Explained; They Will Keep Christmas Day With Christmas Gifts And Christmas Benedictions; They Will Continue To Do It; And Some Day Suddenly Wake Up And Discover Why.

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

Modern Toleration Is Really A Tyranny. It Is A Tyranny Because It Is A Silence.

There Are Two Ways To Get Enough. One Is To Continue To Accumulate More And More. The Other Is To Desire Less.

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.

Madness Does Not Come By Breaking Out, But By Giving In; By Settling Down In Some Dirty, Little, Self-repeating Circle Of Ideas; By Being Tamed.

Children Are Grateful When Santa Claus Puts In Their Stockings Gifts Of Toys Or Sweets. Could I Not Be Grateful To Santa Claus When He Put In My Stockings The Gift Of Two Miraculous Legs? We Thank People For Birthday Presents Of Cigars And Slippers. Can I Thank No One For The Birthday Present Of Birth?

You Cannot Love A Thing Without Wanting To Fight For It.

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.

As For The General View That The Church Was Discredited By The War—they Might As Well Say That The Ark Was Discredited By The Flood. When The World Goes Wrong, It Proves Rather That The Church Is Right. The Church Is Justified, Not Because Her Children Do Not Sin, But Because They Do.

In Anything That Does Cover The Whole Of Your Life - In Your Philosophy And Your Religion - You Must Have Mirth. If You Do Not Have Mirth You Will Certainly Have Madness.

It Has Always Been One Of My Unclerical Sermons To Myself, That That Remark Which Peter Made On Seeing The Vision Of A Single Hour, Ought To Be Made By Us All, In Contemplating Every Panoramic Change In The Long Vision We Call Life... "it Is Good For Us To Be Here - It Is Good For Us To Be Here", Repeating Itself Eternally.

Idolatry Is Committed, Not Merely By Setting Up False Gods, But Also By Setting Up False Devils; By Making Men Afraid Of War Or Alcohol, Or Economic Law, When They Should Be Afraid Of Spiritual Corruption And Cowardice.

I Like The Americans For A Great Many Reasons. I Like Them Because Even The Modern Thing Called Industrialism Has Not Entirely Destroyed In Them The Very Ancient Thing Called Democracy. I Like Them Because They Have A Respect For Work Which Really Curbs The Human Tendency To Snobbishness.

The Humorous Look Of Children Is Perhaps The Most Endearing Of All The Bonds That Hold The Cosmos Together.

A Feminist Is Someone Who Loathes Being A Woman And Who Dislikes The Chief Feminine Characteristics.

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

There Are No Wise Few. Every Aristocracy That Has Ever Existed Has Behaved, In All Essential Points, Exactly Like A Small Mob.

The Original Quality In Any Man Of Imagination Is Imagery.

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.

Every Man Who Will Not Have Softening Of The Heart Must At Last Have Softening Of The Brain

The Books That Influence The World Are Those That It Has Not Read.

There Is No Such Thing On Earth As An Uninteresting Subject; The Only Thing That Can Exist Is An Uninterested Person. Nothing Is More Keenly Required Than A Defence Of Bores. When Byron Divided Humanity Into The Bores And Bored, He Omitted To Notice That The Higher Qualities Exist Entirely In The Bores, The Lower Qualities In The Bored, Among Whom He Counted Himself. The Bore, By His Starry Enthusiasm, His Solemn Happiness, May, In Some Sense, Have Proved Himself Poetical. The Bored Has Certainly Proved Himself Prosaic.

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.

On The Third Day The Friends Of Christ Coming At Daybreak To The Place Found The Grave Empty And The Stone Rolled Away. In Varying Ways They Realized The New Wonder; But Even They Hardly Realized That The World Had Died In The Night. What They Were Looking At Was The First Day Of A New Creation, With A New Heaven And A New Earth; And In A Semblance Of The Gardener God Walked Again In The Garden, In The Cool Not Of The Evening But Of The Dawn.

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.

Hell Is God's Great Compliment To The Reality Of Human Freedom And The Dignity Of Human Choice.

Employers Will Give Time To Eat, Time To Sleep; They Are In Terror Of A Time To Think.

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.

The Professional Soldier Gains More And More Power As The General Courage Of A Community Declines.

When We Were Children We Were Grateful To Those Who Filled Our Stockings At Christmas Time. Why Are We Not Grateful To God For Filling Our Stockings With Legs?

I Always Like A Dog So Long As He Isn't Spelled Backward.

The Past Is Democratic, Because It Is A People. The Future Is Despotic, Because It Is A Caprice. Every Man Is Alone In His Prediction, Just As Each Man Is Alone In A Dream.

Moral Issues Are Always Terribly Complex For Someone Without Principles.

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

In Truth The Church Is Too Unique To Prove Herself Unique. For Most Popular And Easy Proof Is By Parallel; And Here There Is No Parallel.

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.

An Adventure Is Only An Inconvenience Rightly Considered. An Inconvenience Is Only An Adventure Wrongly Considered.

Surprise Is The Secret Of Joy.

Religious And Philosophical Beliefs Are, Indeed, As Dangerous As Fire, And Nothing Can Take From Them That Beauty Of Danger. But There Is Only One Way Of Really Guarding Ourselves Against The Excessive Danger Of Them, And That Is To Be Steeped In Philosophy And Soaked In Religion.

You Can Only Find Truth With Logic If You Have Already Found Truth Without It.

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

Men Can Construct A Science With Very Few Instruments, Or With Very Plain Instruments; But No One On Earth Could Construct A Science With Unreliable Instruments. A Man Might Work Out The Whole Of Mathematics With A Handful Of Pebbles, But Not With A Handful Of Clay Which Was Always Falling Apart Into New Fragments, And Falling Together Into New Combinations. A Man Might Measure Heaven And Earth With A Reed, But Not With A Growing Reed.

Wit Is A Sword; It Is Meant To Make People Feel The Point As Well As See It.

People That Insist Upon Drinking And Driving, Are Putting The Quart Before The Hearse.

One Can No More Have A Private Religion Than One Can Have A Private Sun Or A Private Moon.

Thanks Are The Highest Form Of Thought.

The Average Man Votes Below Himself; He Votes With Half A Mind Or A Hundredth Part Of One. A Man Ought To Vote With The Whole Of Himself, As He Worships Or Gets Married. A Man Ought To Vote With His Head And Heart, His Soul And Stomach, His Eye For Faces And His Ear For Music; Also (when Sufficiently Provoked) With His Hands And Feet. If He Has Ever Seen A Fine Sunset, The Crimson Color Of It Should Creep Into His Vote. The Question Is Not So Much Whether Only A Minority Of The Electorate Votes. The Point Is That Only A Minority Of The Voter Votes.

Gratitude, Being Nearly The Greatest Of Human Duties, Is Also Nearly The Most Difficult.

London Is A Riddle. Paris Is An Explanation.

It Is The Decisive People Who Have Become Civilised; It Is The Indecisive, Otherwise Called The Higher Sceptics, Or The Idealistic Doubters, Who Have Remained Barbarians.

A Fad Or Heresy Is The Exaltation Of Something Which Even If True, Is Secondary Or Temporary In Its Nature Against Those Things Which Are Essential And Eternal, Those Things Which Always Prove Themselves True In The Long Run. In Short, It Is The Setting Up Of The Mood Against The Mind.

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Henry Ward Beecher

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