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There Is Always In The Healthy Mind An Obscure Prompting That Religion Teaches Us Rather To Dig Than To Climb; That If We Could Once Understand The Common Clay Of Earth We Should Understand Everything. Similarly, We Have The Sentiment That If We Could Destroy Custom At A Blow And See The Stars As A Child Sees Them, We Should Need No Other Apocalypse. This Is The Great Truth Which Has Always Lain At The Back Of Baby-worship, And Which Will Support It To The End.

-Gilbert K. Chesterton

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There Is Always In

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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There Is Always In The Healthy Mind An Obscure Prompting That Religion Teaches Us Rather To Dig Than To Climb; That If We Could Once Understand The Common Clay Of Earth We Should Understand Everything. Similarly, We Have The Sentiment That If We Could Destroy Custom At A Blow And See The Stars As A Child Sees Them, We Should Need No Other Apocalypse. This Is The Great Truth Which Has Always Lain At The Back Of Baby-worship, And Which Will Support It To The End.

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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.

We Talk Of Wild Animals But Man Is The Only Wild Animal. It Is Man That Has Broken Out. All Other Animals Are Tame Animals; Following The Rugged Respectability Of The Tribe Or Type.

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

We Are Passing Into A Social Phase In Which Unless A Heroic Effort Is Made For Human Dignity And Freedom, Gold Will Be The Sole Method Of Government And Therefore The Sole Standard Of Manners.

There's A Lot Of Difference Between Listening And Hearing.

Listening And Hearing

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.

If You Do Not Understand A Man You Cannot Crush Him. And If You Do Understand Him, Very Probably You Will Not.

Hope Means Hoping When Things Are Hopeless, Or It Is No Virtue At All... As Long As Matters Are Really Hopeful, Hope Is Mere Flattery Or Platitude; It Is Only When Everything Is Hopeless That Hope Begins To Be A Strength.

The Full Potentialities Of Human Fury Cannot Be Reached Until A Friend Of Both Parties Tactfully Intervenes.

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

Buddhism Is Not A Creed, It Is A Doubt.

I Am At One With My Duality.

Being 'contented' Ought To Mean In English, As It Does In French, Being Pleased. Being Content With An Attic Ought Not To Mean Being Unable To Move From It And Resigned To Living In It; It Ought To Mean Appreciating All There Is In Such A Position.

Ingratitude Is Surely The Chief Of The Intellectual Sins Of Man. He Takes His Political Benefits For Granted, Just As He Takes The Skies And The Seasons For Granted.

I've Searched All The Parks In All The Cities - And Found No Statues Of Committees.

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.

Pride Juggles With Her Toppling Towers, They Strike The Sun And Cease, But The Firm Feet Of Humility They Grip The Ground Like Trees.

Once Remove The Old Arena Of Theological Quarrels, And You Will Throw Open The Whole World To The Most Horrible, The Most Hopeless, The Most Endless, The Most Truly Interminable Quarrels; The Untheological Quarrels.

There Are No New Ideas About Female Education.

Marriage Halves Our Griefs, Doubles Our Joys, And Quadruples Our Expenses

God Is Not A Symbol Of Goodness; Goodness Is A Symbol Of God

People Who Make History Know Nothing About History. You Can See That In The Sort Of History They Make.

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

Men Rush Towards Complexity, But They Yearn Towards Simplicity. They Try To Be Kings; But They Dream Of Being Shepherds.

Mr. Blatchford Says That There Was Not A Fall But A Gradual Rise. But The Very Word "rise" Implies That You Know Toward What You Are Rising. Unless There Is A Standard You Cannot Tell Whether You Are Rising Or Falling. But The Main Point Is That The Fall Like Every Other Large Path Of Christianity Is Embodied In The Common Language Talked On The Top Of An Omnibus. Anybody Might Say, "very Few Men Are Really Manly." Nobody Would Say, "very Few Whales Are Really Whaley."

The Function Of The Imagination Is Not To Make Strange Things Settled, So Much As To Make Settled Things Strange.

There Are No Uninteresting Things, Only Uninterested People.

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.

One Of The Deepest And Strangest Of All Human Moods Is The Mood Which Will Suddenly Strike Us Perhaps In A Garden At Night, Or Deep In Sloping Meadows, The Feeling That Every Flower And Leaf Has Just Uttered Something Stupendously Direct And Important, And That We Have By A Prodigy Of Imbecility Not Heard Or Understood It. There Is A Certain Poetic Value, And That A Genuine One, In This Sense Of Having Missed The Full Meaning Of Things. There Is Beauty, Not Only In Wisdom, But In This Dazed And Dramatic Ignorance.

All We Know Of The Missing Link Is That He Is Missing - And He Won't Be Missed Either.

Individually, Men May Present A More Or Less Rational Appearance, Eating, Sleeping, And Scheming. But Humanity A A Whole Is Changeful, Mystical, Fickle, Delightful. Men Are Men, But Man Is A Woman.

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

No One Can Understand Paris And Its History Who Does Not Understand That Its Fierceness Is The Balance And Justification Of Its Frivolity. It Is Called A City Of Pleasure; But It May Also Very Specially Be Called A City Of Pain. The Crown Of Roses Is Also A Crown Of Thorns. Its People Are Too Prone To Hurt Others, But Quite Ready Also To Hurt Themselves. They Are Martyrs For Religion, They Are Martyrs For Irreligion; They Are Even Martyrs For Immorality.

A Man Must Be Orthodox Upon Most Things, Or He Will Never Even Have Time To Preach His Own Heresy.

I Would Maintain That Thanks Are The Highest Form Of Thought; And That Gratitude Is Happiness Doubled By Wonder.

A New Philosophy Generally Means In Practice The Praise Of Some Old Vice.

Why Should Anything Go Right; Even Observation And Deduction? Why Should Not Good Logic Be As Misleading As Bad Logic? They Are Both Movements In The Brain Of A Bewildered Ape?

All The Controversialists Who Have Become Conscious Of The Real Issue Are Already Saying Of Our Ideal Exactly What Used To Be Said Of The Socialists' Ideal. They Are Saying That Private Property Is Too Ideal Not To Be Impossible. They Are Saying That Private Enterprise Is Too Good To Be True. They Are Saying That The Idea Of Ordinary Men Owning Ordinary Possessions Is Against The Laws Of Political Economy And Requires An Alteration In Human Nature.

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...

What We Suffer From Today Is Humility In The Wrong Place...the Old Humility Was A Spur That Prevented A Man From Stopping; Not A Nail In His Boot That Prevented Him From Going On. For The Old Humility Made A Man Doubtful About His Efforts, Which Made Him Work Harder. But The New Humility Makes A Man Doubtful About His Aims, Which Will Make Him Stop Working Altogether.

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

A Mystic Is A Man Who Separates Heaven And Earth Even If He Enjoys Them Both.

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 One Created Thing Which We Cannot Look At Is The One Thing In The Light Of Which We Look At Everything.

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.

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

Divine Revelation

Agnostic Is The Greek Word, For The Latin Word, For Ignorant

Boys Like Romantic [fairy] Tales; But Babies Like Realistic Tales - Because They Find Them Romantic...this Proves That Even Nursery Tales Only Echo An Almost Prenatal Leap Of Interest And Amazement. These Tales Say That Apples Were Golden Only To Refresh The Forgotten Moment When We Found That They Were Green. They Make Rivers Run With Wine Only To Make Us Remember, For One Wild Moment, That They Run With Water.

It Is Impossible Without Humility To Enjoy Anything - Even Pride.

Christian Science … Is The Direct Denial Both Of Science And Of Christianity, For Science Rests Wholly On The Recognition Of Truth And Christianity On The Recognition Of Pain.

Only Friendliness Produces Friendship. And We Must Look Far Deeper Into The Soul Of Man For The Thing That Produces Friendliness.

The Whole Order Of Things Is As Outrageous As Any Miracle Which Could Presume To Violate It.

Brave Men Are All Vertebrates; They Have Their Softness On The Surface And Their Toughness In The Middle.

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

Whatever The Word "great" Means, Dickens Was What It Means.

Men Rush Toward Complexity; But Yearn For Simplicity.

Great Truths Can Only Be Forgotten And Can Never Be Falsified.

La Mejor Prueba De La Cultura Y La Liberalidad De Un Hombre Es Su Actitud Ante Las Cosas Que Nunca Sucedieron.

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

The Modern Materialists Are Not Permitted To Doubt; They Are Forbidden To Believe.

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

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. . . .

In Dealing With The Arrogant Asserter Of Doubt, It Is Not The Right Method To Tell Him To Stop Doubting. It Is Rather The Right Method To Tell Him To Go On Doubting, To Doubt A Little More, To Doubt Every Day Newer And Wilder Things In The Universe, Until At Last, By Some Strange Enlightenment, He May Begin To Doubt Himself.

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

Poetry Is Sane Because It Floats Easily In An Infinite Sea; Reason Seeks To Cross The Infinite Sea And So Make It Finite. The Result Is Mental Exhaustion. To Accept Everything Is An Exercise, To Understand Everything A Strain.

Soldiers Have Many Faults, But They Have One Redeeming Merit; They Are Never Worshippers Of Force. Soldiers More Than Any Other Men Are Taught Severely And Systematically That Might Is Not Right. The Fact Is Obvious. The Might Is In The Hundred Men Who Obey. The Right (or What Is Held To Be Right) Is In The One Man Who Commands Them.

We Call A Man A Bigot Or A Slave Of Dogma Because He Is A Thinker Who Has Thought Thoroughly And To A Definite End.

Vigorous Organisms Talk Not About Their Processes, But About Their Aims.

Christianity, Whatever Else It Is, Is An Explosion. Unless It Is Sensational There Is Simply No Sense In It. Unless The Gospel Sounds Like A Gun Going Off It Has Not Been Uttered At All.

Thinking In Isolation And With Pride Ends In Being An Idiot.

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

Plato Was Only A Bernard Shaw Who Unfortunately Made His Jokes In Greek.

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.

When You Have Really Exhausted An Experience You Always Reverence And Love It.

A Man Does Not Know What He Is Saying Until He Knows What He Is Not Saying.

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

It Is Not Bigotry To Be Certain We Are Right; But It Is Bigotry To Be Unable To Imagine How We Might Possibly Have Gone Wrong.

To Say That A Man Is An Idealist Is Merely To Say That He Is A Man.

Laughter Has Something In It Common With The Ancient Words Of Faith And Inspiration; It Unfreezes Pride And Unwinds Secrecy; It Makes People Forget Themselves In The Presence Of Something Greater Than Themselves.

Men Feel That Cruelty To The Poor Is A Kind Of Cruelty To Animals. They Never Feel That It Is An Injustice To Equals; Nay It Is Treachery To Comrades.

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.

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.

The Chief Object Of Education Is Not To Learn Things But To Unlearn Things.

When We Really Worship Anything, We Love Not Only Its Clearness But Its Obscurity. We Exult In Its Very Invisibility.

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.

Without Education We Are In A Horrible And Deadly Danger Of Taking Educated People Seriously.

Without Authority There Is No Liberty. Freedom Is Doomed To Destruction At Every Turn, Unless There Is A Recognized Right To Freedom. And If There Are Rights, There Is An Authority To Which We Appeal For Them.

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

Acceptance Is The Truest Kinship With Humanity.

The Repetition In Nature May Not Be A Mere Recurrence; It May Be A Theatrical Encore.

A Puritan Is A Person Who Pours Righteous Indignation Into The Wrong Things.

America Is The Only Nation In The World That Is Founded On Creed. That Creed Is Set Forth With Dogmatic And Even Theological Lucidity In The Declaration Of Independence; Perhaps The Only Piece Of Practical Politics That Is Also Theoretical Politics And Also Great Literature.

Joy, Which Was The Small Publicity Of The Pagan, Is The Gigantic Secret Of The Christian.

You Don't Want To Be So Open Minded That Your Brains Fall Out!

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.

Freethinkers Are Occasionally Thoughtful, Though Never Free.

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.

For The Only Courage Worth Calling Courage Must Necessarily Mean That The Soul Passes A Breaking Point And Does Not Break.

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

Church And State

I Believe In Preaching To The Converted; For I Have Generally Found That The Converted Do Not Understand Their Own Religion.

All Good Men Are International. Nearly All Bad Men Are Cosmopolitan. If We Are To Be International We Must Be National.

Internationalism

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.

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

The Poor Complain That They Are Governed Badly. The Rich Complain That They Are Governed At All.

The Men Of The Clique Live Together Because They Have The Same Kind Of Soul, And Their Narrowness Is A Narrowness Of Spiritual Coherence And Contentment, Like That Which Exists In Hell . . .

Christmas Is Built Upon A Beautiful And Intentional Paradox; That The Birth Of The Homeless Should Be Celebrated In Every Home.

Religious Unity Can Look Like A Carnival And Religious Liberty Can Look Like A Funeral.

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

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

To Be Clever Enough To Get All That Money, One Must Be Stupid Enough To Want It.

Paradox - Truth Standing On Her Head To Get Attention.

The English Are No Nearer Than They Were A Hundred Years Ago To Knowing What Jefferson Really Meant When He Said That God Had Created All Men Equal.

Latter-day Scepticism Is Fond Of Calling Itself Progressive; But Scepticism Is Really Reactionary. Scepticism Goes Back; It Attempts To Unsettle What Has Already Been Settled. Instead Of Trying To Break Up New Fields With Its Plough, It Simply Tries To Break Up The Plough.

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.

I Need Not Pause To Explain That Crime Is Not A Disease. It Is Criminology That Is A Disease.

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.

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.

Every Politician Is Emphatically A Promising Politician.

It Is One Thing To Describe An Interview With A Gorgon Or A Griffin, A Creature Who Does Not Exist. It Is Another Thing To Discover That The Rhinoceros Does Exist And Then Take Pleasure In The Fact That He Looks As If He Didn't.

One Elephant Having A Trunk Was Odd; But All Elephants Having Trunks Looked Like A Plot.

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.

For Us Who Live In Cities Nature Is Not Natural. Nature Is Supernatural. Just As Monks Watched And Strove To Get A Glimpse Of Heaven, So We Watch And Strive To Get A Glimpse Of Earth. It Is As If Men Had Cake And Wine Every Day But Were Sometimes Allowed Common Bread.

The Humorous Look Of Children Is Perhaps The Most Endearing Of All The Bonds That Hold The Cosmos Together. Their Top-heavy Dignity Is More Touching Than Any Humility; Their Solemnity Gives Us More Hope For All Things Than A Thousand Carnivals Of Optimism; Their Large And Lustrous Eyes Seem To Hold All The Stars In Their Astonishment; Their Fascinating Absence Of Nose Seems To Give To Us The Most Perfect Hint Of The Humour That Awaits Us In The Kingdom Of Heaven.

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.

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.

The Voice Of The Special Rebels And Prophets, Recommending Discontent, Should, As I Have Said, Sound Now And Then Suddenly, Like A Trumpet. But The Voices Of The Saints And Sages, Recommending Contentment, Should Sound Unceasingly, Like The Sea.

Just The Other Day In The Underground I Enjoyed The Pleasure Of Offering My Seat To Three Ladies.

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

Stated Baldly, Charity Certainly Means One Of Two Things–pardoning Unpardonable Acts, Or Loving Unlovable People.

Some Of The Most Frantic Lies On The Face Of Life Are Told With Modesty And Restraint; For The Simple Reason That Only Modesty And Restraint Will Save Them.

There Are No Words To Express The Abyss Between Isolation And Having One Ally. It May Be Conceded To The Mathematician That Four Is Twice Two. But Two Is Not Twice One; Two Is Two Thousand Times One.

Tolerance Is The Virtue Of People Who Do Not Believe In Anything.

A Thing May Be Too Sad To Be Believed Or Too Wicked To Be Believed Or Too Good To Be Believed; But It Cannot Be Too Absurd To Be Believed In This Planet Of Frogs And Elephants, Of Crocodiles And Cuttle-fish.

A Man Is Angry At A Libel Because It Is False, But At A Satire Because It Is True.

To Be Wrong, And To Be Carefully Wrong, That Is The Definition Of Decadence.

A Crown Of Roses Is Also A Crown Of Thorns.

When The Chord Of Monotony Is Stretched To Its Tightest, It Breaks With The Sound Of A Song.

Now It Has Appeared To Me Unfair That Humanity Should Be Engaged Perpetually In Calling All Those Things Bad Which Have Been Good Enough To Make Other Things Better, In Everlastingly Kicking Down The Ladder By Which It Has Climbed. It Has Appeared To Me That Progress Should Be Something Else Besides A Continual Parricide; Therefore 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.

It Is Absurd For The Evolutionist To Complain That It Is Unthinkable For An Admittedly Unthinkable God To Make Everything Out Of Nothing And Then Pretend That It Is More Thinkable That Nothing Should Turn Itself Into Everything.

And My Haunting Instinct That Somehow Good Was Not Merely A Tool To Be Used, But A Relic To Be Guarded, Like The Goods From Crusoe's Ship--even That Had Been The Wild Whisper Of Something Originally Wise, For, According To Christianity, We Were Indeed The Survivors Of A Wreck, The Crew Of A Golden Ship That Had Gone Down Before The Beginning Of The World.

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.

There Are No Rules Of Architecture For A Castle In The Clouds.

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.

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.

There Is Always In The Healthy Mind An Obscure Prompting That Religion Teaches Us Rather To Dig Than To Climb; That If We Could Once Understand The Common Clay Of Earth We Should Understand Everything. Similarly, We Have The Sentiment That If We Could Destroy Custom At A Blow And See The Stars As A Child Sees Them, We Should Need No Other Apocalypse. This Is The Great Truth Which Has Always Lain At The Back Of Baby-worship, And Which Will Support It To The End.

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.

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.

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.

There Is No Bigot Like The Atheist.

The Cosmos Is About The Smallest Hole That A Man Can Hide His Head In.

Youth Is Always Too Serious, And Just Now It Is Too Serious About Frivolity.

Political Economy Means That Everybody Except Politicians Must Be Economical.

It Is Hard To Make Government Representative When It Is Also Remote.

Representatives

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 Good Things In A Society No Longer Work That The Society Begins To Decline; When Its Food Does Not Feed, When Its Cures Do Not Cure, When Its Blessings Refuse To Bless.

There Are An Infinity Of Angles At Which One Falls, Only One At Which One Stands.

The Honest Poor Can Sometimes Forget Poverty. The Honest Rich Can Never Forget It.

The Sentimentalist, Roughly Speaking, Is The Man Who Wants To Eat His Cake And Have It. He Has No Sense Of Honor About Ideas; He Will Not See That One Must Pay For An Idea As Well As For Anything Else. He Will Have Them All At Once In One Wild Intellectual Harem, No Matter How Much They Quarrel And Contradict Each Other.

Marriage Is A Sort Of Poetical See-saw.

I Am A Journalist And Have No Earthly Motives Except Curiosity And Personal Vanity.

A Great Deal Of Contemporary Criticism Reads To Me Like A Man Saying, 'of Course I Do Not Like Green Cheese. I Am Very Fond Of Brown Sherry.

Experience Which Was Once Claimed By The Aged Is Now Claimed Exclusively By The Young.

Surprise Is The Secret Of Joy.

Every Sane Man Recognises That Unlimited Liberty Is Anarchy, Or Rather Is Nonentity. The Civic Idea Of Liberty Is To Give The Citizen A Province Of Liberty; A Limitation Within Which A Citizen Is A King.

To Have A Right To Do A Thing Is Not At All The Same As To Be Right In Doing It.

A Sober Man May Become A Drunkard Through Being A Coward. A Brave Man May Become A Coward Through Being A Drunkard.

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.

Christian Inspirational

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.

Materialists And Madmen Never Have Doubts.

When Fishes Flew And Forests Walked And Figs Grew Upon Thorn, Some Moment When The Moon Was Blood Then Surely I Was Born. With Monstrous Head And Sickening Cry And Ears Like Errant Wings, The Devil's Walking Parody On All Four-footed Things.

Fallacies Do Not Cease To Be Fallacies Because They Become Fashions.

There Have Been Household Gods And Household Saints And Household Fairies. I Am Not Sure That There Have Yet Been Any Factory Gods Or Factory Saints Or Factory Fairies. I May Be Wrong, As I Am No Commericial Expert, But I Have Not Heard Of Them As Yet.

The Bible Tells Us To Love Our Neighbors, And Also To Love Our Enemies; Probably Because They Are Generally The Same People.

Christianity Even When Watered Down Is Hot Enough To Boil All Modern Society To Rags.

Marxism: The Theory That All The Important Things In History Are Rooted In An Economic Motive, That History Is A Science, A Science Of The Search For Food.

My Brother, Cecil Edward Chesterton, Was Born When I Was About Five Years Old; And, After A Brief Pause, Began To Argue. He Continued To Argue To The End. I Am Glad To Think That Through All Those Years We Never Stopped Arguing; And We Never Once Quarreled. Perhaps The Principal Objection To A Quarrel Is That It Interrupts An Argument.

Poets Do Not Go Mad; But Chess-players Do. Mathematicians Go Mad, And Cashiers; But Creative Artists Very Seldom. I Am Not, As Will Be Seen, In Any Sense Attacking Logic: I Only Say That This Danger Does Lie In Logic, Not In Imagination.

Once I Planned To Write A Book Of Poems Entirely About The Things In My Pocket. But I Found It Would Be Too Long; And The Age Of The Great Epics Is Past.

In The Glad Old Days, Before The Rise Of Modern Morbidities...it Used To Be Thought A Disadvantage To Be Misunderstood.

Science In The Modern World Has Many Uses; Its Chief Use, However, Is To Provide Long Words To Cover The Errors Of The Rich.

Gratitude Produced The Most Purely Joyful Moments That Have Been Known To Man.

The Average Businessman Began To Be Agnostic, Not So Much Because He Did Not Know Where He Was, As Because He Wanted To Forget. Many Of The Rich Took To Scepticism Exactly As The Poor Took To Drink; Because It Was A Way Out.

Mr. Mccabe Thinks That I Am Not Serious But Only Funny, Because Mr. Mccabe Thinks That Funny Is The Opposite Of Serious. Funny Is The Opposite Of Not Funny And Nothing Else.

I Have Argued With Him On Almost Every Subject In The World, And We Have Always Been On Opposite Sides, Without Affectation Or Animosity... It Is Necessary To Disagree With Him As Much As I Do, In Order To Admire Him As I Do; And I Am Proud Of Him As A Foe Even More Than As A Friend.

Sir Hiram Maxim Is A Genuine And Typical Example Of The Man Of Science, Romantic, Excitable, Full Of Real But Somewhat Obvious Poetry, A Little Hazy In Logic And Philosophy, But Full Of Hearty Enthusiasm And An Honorable Simplicity. He Is, As He Expresses It, "an Old And Trained Engineer," And Is Like All Of The Old And Trained Engineers I Have Happened To Come Across, A Man Who Indemnifies Himself For The Superhuman Or Inhuman Concentration Required For Physical Science By A Vague And Dangerous Romanticism About Everything Else.

There Are No Boring Subjects, Only Disinterested Minds.

The Only People Who Seem To Have Nothing To Do With The Education Of The Children Are The Parents.

Precisely Because Our Political Speeches Are Meant To Be Reported, They Are Not Worth Reporting. Precisely Because They Are Carefully Designed To Be Read, Nobody Reads Them.

Political Speeches

There Cannot Be A Nation Of Millionaires, And There Never Has Been A Nation Of Utopian Comrades; But There Have Been Any Number Of Nations Of Tolerably Contented Peasants.

Dipsomaniac And The Abstainer Are Not Only Both Mistaken, But They Both Make The Same Mistake. They Both Regard Wine As A Drug And Not As A Drink.

A Really Great Person Is The Person Who Makes Every Person Feel Great.

Ten Thousand Women Marched Through The Streets Shouting, 'we Will Not Be Dictated To,' And Went Off And Became Stenographers.

No Man Can Break Any Of The Ten Commandments. He Can Only Break Himself Against Them.

America Has A Genius For The Encouragement Of Fame.

Earnest Freethinkers Need Not Worry Themselves So Much About The Persecutions Of The Past. Before The Liberal Idea Is Dead Or Triumphant We Shall See Wars And Persecutions The Like Of Which The World Has Never Seen.

Being A Success At Work Is Not Worth It If It Means Being A Failure At Home.

Fairy Tales Are More Than True.

Humour Is Meant, In A Literal Sense, To Make Game Of Man; That Is, To Dethrone Him From His Official Dignity And Hunt Him Like Game.

Classic Literature Is Still Something That Hangs In The Air Like A Song.

As To The Doubt Of The Soul I Discover It To Be False: A Mood Not A Conclusion. My Conclusion Is The Faith. Corporate, Organized, A Personality, Teaching. A Thing, Not A Theory. It.

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