Background Image

...

We All Live In The Past, Because There Is Nothing Else To Live In. To Live In The Present Is Like Proposing To Sit On A Pin. It Is Too Minute, It Is Too Slight A Support, It Is Too Uncomfortable A Posture, And It Is Of Necessity Followed Immediately By Totally Different Experiences, Analogous To Those Of Jumping Up With A Yell.

-Gilbert K. Chesterton

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

We All Live In

Gilbert K. Chesterton

...

We All Live In The Past, Because There Is Nothing Else To Live In. To Live In The Present Is Like Proposing To Sit On A Pin. It Is Too Minute, It Is Too Slight A Support, It Is Too Uncomfortable A Posture, And It Is Of Necessity Followed Immediately By Totally Different Experiences, Analogous To Those Of Jumping Up With A Yell.

Views: 13567

Topic

Different Experiences

More From Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

By Experts In Poverty I Do Not Mean Sociologists, But Poor Men.

There Are Two Kinds Of Paradoxes. They Are Not So Much The Good And The Bad, Nor Even The True And The False. Rather They Are The Fruitful And The Barren; The Paradoxes Which Produce Life And The Paradoxes That Merely Announce Death. Nearly All Modern Paradoxes Merely Announce Death.

To Downgrade The Human Mind Is Bad Theology.

Truths Turn Into Dogmas The Minute They Are Disputed.

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

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

The Best Kind Of Giving Is Thanksgiving.

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.

The Cross Cannot Be Defeated For It Is Defeat.

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

Every Work Of Art Has One Indispensable Mark ... The Center Of It Is Simple, However Much The Fulfillment May Be Complicated.

It Is Customary To Complain Of The Bustle And Strenuousness Of Our Epoch. But In Truth The Chief Mark Of Our Epoch Is A Profound Laziness And Fatigue; And The Fact Is That The Real Laziness Is The Cause Of The Apparent Bustle.

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.

Many Clever Men Like You Have Trusted To Civilization. Many Clever Babylonians, Many Clever Egyptians, Many Clever Men At The End Of Rome. Can You Tell Me, In A World That Is Flagrant With The Failures Of Civilisation, What There Is Particularly Immortal About Yours?

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

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

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

There Is A Corollary To The Conception Of Being Too Proud To Fight. It Is That The Humble Have To Do Most Of The Fighting.

An Inconvenience Is An Adventure Wrongly Considered.

...but Out Of The Desert, From The Dry Places And The Dreadful Suns, Come The Cruel Children Of The Lonely God; The Real Unitarians Who With Scimitar In Hand Have Laid Waste The World. For It Is Not Well For God To Be Alone.

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.

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.

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

Truths Turn Into Dogmas The Instant That They Are Disputed. Thus Every Man Who Utters A Doubt Defines A Religion.

Boys Like Romantic Tales; But Babies Like Realistic Tales-because They Find Them Romantic.

It's The First Effect Of Not Believing In God That You Lose Your Common Sense.

The Noble Temptation To See Too Much In Everything.

At The Back Of Our Brains Is A Blaze Of Astonishment At Our Own Existence. The Object Of The Artistic And Spiritual Life Is To Dig For This Sunrise Of Wonder.

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.

No Sceptical Philosopher Can Ask Any Questions That May Not Equally Be Asked By A Tired Child On A Hot Afternoon.

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.

The Prophet And The Quack Are Alike Admired For A Generation, And Admired For The Wrong Reasons.

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

The Classes That Wash Most Are Those That Work Least.

Compromise Used To Mean That Half A Loaf Was Better Than No Bread. Among Modern Statesmen It Really Seems To Mean That Half A Loaf; Is Better Than A Whole Loaf.

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

Life Exists For The Love Of Music Or Beautiful Things.

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.

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.

Every One Of The Great Revolutionists, From Isaiah To Shelley, Have Been Optimists. They Have Been Indignant, Not About The Badness Of Existence, But About The Slowness Of Men In Realizing Its Goodness.

Marriage Is A Duel To The Death Which No Man Of Honour Should Decline.

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

I Am Concerned With A Certain Way Of Looking At Life, Which Was Created In Me By The Fairy Tales, But Has Since Been Meekly Ratified By The Mere Facts.

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

It Is Largely Because The Free-thinkers, As A School, Have Hardly Made Up Their Minds Whether They Want To Be More Optimist Or More Pessimist Than Christianity That Their Small But Sincere Movement Has Failed.

We Do Not Want, As The Newspapers Say, A Church That Will Move With The World. We Want A Church That Will Move The World.

A Good Civilisation Spreads Over Us Freely Like A Tree, Varying And Yielding Because It Is Alive. A Bad Civilisation Stands Up And Sticks Out Above Us Like An Umbrella-artificial, Mathematical In Shape; Not Merely Universal, But Uniform.

Education Is Simply The Soul Of A Society As It Passes From One Generation To Another.

The Act Of Defending Any Of The Cardinal Virtues Has Today All The Exhilaration Of A Vice.

A Stiff Apology Is A Second Insult... The Injured Party Does Not Want To Be Compensated Because He Has Been Wronged; He Wants To Be Healed Because He Has Been Hurt.

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

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

Americans Have A Taste For…rocking-chairs. A Flippant Critic Might Suggest That They Select Rocking-chairs So That, Even When They Are Sitting Down, They Need Not Be Sitting Still. Something Of This Restlessness In The Race May Really Be Involved In The Matter; But I Think The Deeper Significance Of The Rocking-chair May Still Be Found In The Deeper Symbolism Of The Rocking-horse. I Think There Is Behind All This Fresh And Facile Use Of Wood A Certain Spirit That Is Childish In The Good Sense Of The Word; Something That Is Innocent, And Easily Pleased.

And When It Rains On Your Parade, Look Up Rather Than Down. Without The Rain, There Would Be No Rainbow.

Silence Is The Unbearable Repartee.

Very Few Reputations Are Gained By Unsullied Virtue.

One Pleasure Attached To Growing Older Is That Many Things Seem To Be Growing Younger; Growing Fresher And More Lively Than We Once Supposed Them To Be.

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.

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

The Human Race, To Which So Many Of My Readers Belong, Has Been Playing At Children's Games From The Beginning, And Will Probably Do It Till The End, Which Is A Nuisance For The Few People Who Grow Up.

Art Is The Signature Of Man.

The State Did Not Own Men So Entirely, Even When It Could Send Them To The Stake, As It Sometimes Does Now Where It Can Send Them To The Elementary School.

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 Modern Habit Of Saying "this Is My Opinion, But I May Be Wrong" Is Entirely Irrational. If I Say That It May Be Wrong, I Say That Is Not My Opinion. The Modern Habit Of Saying "every Man Has A Different Philosophy; This Is My Philosophy And It Suits Me" – The Habit Of Saying This Is Mere Weak-mindedness. A Cosmic Philosophy Is Not Constructed To Fit A Man; A Cosmic Philosophy Is Constructed To Fit A Cosmos. A Man Can No More Possess A Private Religion Than He Can Possess A Private Sun And Moon.

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.

Obviously If Any Actions, Even A Lunatic's, Can Be Causeless, Determinism Is Done For. If The Chain Of Causation Can Be Broken For A Madman, It Can Be Broken For A Man.

It Is Really Not So Repulsive To See The Poor Asking For Money As To See The Rich Asking For More Money. And Advertisement Is The Rich Asking For More Money.

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.

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

Marriage Is A Sort Of Poetical See-saw.

...a Figure Of Speech Can Often Get Into A Crack Too Small For A Definition.

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

All Architecture Is Great Architecture After Sunset.

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

Church And State

The Problem Of Disbelieving In God Is Not That A Man Ends Up Believing Nothing. Alas, It Is Much Worse. He Ends Up Believing Anything.

Here Ends Another Day, During Which I Have Had Eyes, Ears, Hands And The Great World Around Me. Tomorrow Begins Another Day. Why Am I Allowed Two?

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.

Only Men To Whom The Family Is Sacred Will Ever Have A Standard Or A Status By Which To Criticize The State. They Alone Can Appeal To Something More Holy Than The Gods Of The City.

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

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.

When People Begin To Ignore Human Dignity, It Will Not Be Long Before They Begin To Ignore Human Rights.

I Will Not Call It My Philosophy; For I Did Not Make It. God And Humanity Made It; And It Made Me.

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.

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.

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

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

I Have Little Doubt That When St. George Had Killed The Dragon He Was Heartily Afraid Of The Princess.

I Represent The Jolly Mass Of Mankind. I Am The Happy And Reckless Christian.

I Left The Fairy Tales Lying On The Floor Of The Nursery, And I Have Not Found Any Books So Sensible Since.

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

All Architecture Is Great Architecture After Sunset; Perhaps Architecture Is Really A Nocturnal Art, Like The Art Of Fireworks.

[marxism Will] In A Generation Or So [go] Into The Limbo Of Most Heresies, But Meanwhile It Will Have Poisoned The Russian Revolution.

You Never Know The Best About Men Until You Know The Worst About Them.

It Never Occurred To Him To Be Spiritually Won Over To The Enemy. Many Moderns, Inured To A Weak Worship Of Intellect And Force, Might Have Wavered In Their Allegiance Under This Oppression Of A Great Personality. . . . But This Was A Kind Of Modern Meanness To Which Syme Could Not Sink Even In His Extreme Morbidity. Like Any Man, He Was Coward Enough To Fear Great Force; But He Was Not Coward Enough To Admire It.

Humor Can Get In Under The Door While Seriousness Is Still Fumbling At The Handle

Suppose, My Dear Chadd, Suppose It Is We Who Are The Idiots Because We Are Not Afraid Of Devils In The Dark?

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.

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

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.

Atheism Is Indeed The Most Daring Of All Dogmas . . . For It Is The Assertion Of A Universal Negative.

It Is True That I Am Of An Older Fashion; Much That I Love Has Been Destroyed Or Sent Into Exile.

And Pray Where In Earth Or Heaven Are There Prudent Marriages-might As Well Talk About Prudent Suicides.

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.

The People Has No Definite Disbelief In The Temples Of Theology. The People Has A Very Fiery And Practical Disbelief In The Temples Of Physical Science.

It Is Easy To Be Heavy: Hard To Be Light.

The Cause Which Is Blocking All Progress Today Is The Subtle Scepticism Which Whispers In A Million Ears That Things Are Not Good Enough To Be Worth Improving. If The World Is Good We Are Revolutionaries, If The World Is Evil We Must Be Conservatives. These Essays, Futile As They Are Considered As Serious Literature, Are Yet Ethically Sincere, Since They Seek To Remind Men That Things Must Be Loved First And Improved Afterwards.

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.

The True Object Of Human Life Is Play.

The Man Who Says, 'my Country Right Or Wrong' Is Like The Man Who Says, 'my Mother Drunk Or Sober'

You Can Free Things From Alien Or Accidental Laws, But Not From The Laws Of Their Own Nature. You May, If You Like, Free A Tiger From His Bars; But Do Not Free Him From His Stripes.

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

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

Fairy Tales Are More Than True.

Nothing Taken For Granted; Everything Received With Gratitude; Everything Passed On With Grace.

I Am Myself So Exceedingly Nordic, As Far As Physical Constitution Is Concerned, That I Can Enjoy Almost Any Weather Except What Is Called Glorious Weather. At The End Of A Few Days, I Am Left Wondering How The Men Of The Mediterranean Ever Managed To Do Almost All The Most Active And Astonishing Things That Have Been Done.

When Some English Moralists Write About The Importance Of Having Character, They Appear To Mean Only The Importance Of Having A Dull Character.

The Thing That Cannot Be Defined Is The First Thing; The Primary Fact.

Some Men Never Feel Small, But These Are The Few Men Who Are.

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

Dear Sir: Regarding Your Article 'what's Wrong With The World?' I Am. Yours Truly.

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 Whole Curse Of The Last Century Has Been What Is Called The Swing Of The Pendulum; That Is, The Idea That Man Must Go Alternately From One Extreme To The Other. It Is A Shameful And Even Shocking Fancy; It Is The Denial Of The Whole Dignity Of The Mankind. When Man Is Alive He Stands Still. It Is Only When He Is Dead That He Swings.

To Be Simple Is The Best Thing In The World.

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.

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

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

I Regard Golf As An Expensive Way Of Playing Marbles.

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

Life Is Not An Illogicality; Yet It Is A Trap For Logicians. It Looks Just A Little More Mathematical And Regular Than It Is; Its Exactitude Is Obvious, But Its Inexactitude Is Hidden; Its Wildness Lies In Wait.

Any One Of The Strange Laws We Suffer Is A Compromise Between A Fad And A Vested Interest.

By A Curious Confusion, Many Modern Critics Have Passed From The Proposition That A Masterpiece May Be Unpopular To The Other Proposition That Unless It Is Unpopular It Cannot Be A Masterpiece.

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.

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.

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

Adventure Is The Champagne Of Life.

Inspirational Life

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.

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

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.

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

A Naked Moon Stood In A Naked Sky.

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.

This Is, First And Last, The Real Value Of Christmas; In So Far As The Mythology Remains At All It Is A Kind Of Happy Mythology. Personally, Of Course, I Believe In Santa Claus; But It Is The Season Of Forgiveness, And I Will Forgive Others For Not Doing So.

I Agree With The Realistic Irishman Who Said He Preferred To Prophesy After The Event.

I Still Think Sincere Pessimism The Unpardonable Sin.

The Poetry Of Art Is In Beholding The Single Tower; The Poetry Of Nature In Seeing The Single Tree; The Poetry Of Love In Following The Single Woman; The Poetry Of Religion In Worshipping The Single Star.

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

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.

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.

This Is The Perpetual And Pitiful Tragedy Of The Practical Man In Practical Affairs. He Always Begins With A Flourish Of Contempt For What He Calls Theorizing And What People Who Can Do It Call Thinking. He Will Not Wait For Logic-that Is, In The Most Exact Sense, He Will Not Listen To Reason. It Will Therefore Appear To Him An Idle And Ineffectual Proceeding To Say That There Is A Reason For His Present Failure. Nevertheless, It May Be Well To Say It, And To Try And Make It Clear Even To Him.

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.

Men Reform A Thing By Removing The Reality From It, And Then Do Not Know What To Do With The Unreality That Is Left.

Men Invent New Ideals Because They Dare Not Attempt Old Ideals. They Look Forward With Enthusiasm, Because They Are Afraid To Look Back.

When It Comes To Life The Critical Thing Is Whether You Take Things For Granted Or Take Them With Gratitude.

Folk-lore Means That The Soul Is Sane, But That The Universe Is Wild And Full Of Marvels. Realism Means That The World Is Dull And Full Of Routine, But That The Soul Is Sick And Screaming. The Problem Of The Fairy Tale Is: What Will A Healthy Man Do With A Fantastic World? The Problems Of The Modern Novel Is: What Will A Madman Do With A Dull World? In The Fairy Tales The Cosmos Goes Mad; But The Hero Does Not Go Mad. In The Modern Novels The Hero Is Mad Before The Book Begins, And Suffers From The Harsh Steadiness And Cruel Sanity Of The Cosmos.

The Martyr Endured Tortures To Affirm His Belief In Truth But He Never Asserted His Disbelief In Torture.

The Lunatic Is The Man Who Lives In A Small World But Thinks It Is A Large One; He Is The Man Who Lives In A Tenth Of The Truth, And Thinks It Is The Whole. The Madman Cannot Conceive Any Cosmos Outside A Certain Tale Or Conspiracy Or Vision.

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

Teach To The Young, Men's Enduring Truths, And Let The Learned Amuse Themselves With Their Passing Errors.

Progress Is The Mother Of Problems.

To Complain That I Could Only Be Married Once Was Like Complaining That I Had Only Been Born Once.

Like Every Book I Never Wrote, It Is By Far The Best Book I Have Ever Written.

Progress Is The Mother Of All Problems.

Every Politician Is Emphatically A Promising Politician.

The Traveler Sees What He Sees, The Tourist Sees What He Has Come To See.

The Golden Age Only Comes To Men When They Have Forgotten Gold.

There Are Two Ways Of Getting Home; And One Of Them Is To Stay There.

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

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

It Is Quite An Old-fashioned Fallacy To Suppose That Our Objection To Scepticism Is That It Removes The Discipline From Life. Our Objection To Scepticism Is That It Removes The Motive Power. Materialism Is Not A Thing Which Destroys Mere Restraint. Materialism Itself Is The Great Restraint.

He Walked By Instinct Along One White Road, On Which Early Birds Hopped And Sang, And Found Himself Outside A Fenced Garden. There He Saw The Sister Of Gregory, The Girl With The Gold-red Hair, Cutting Lilac Before Breakfast, With The Great Unconscious Gravity Of A Girl.

The Ordinary Scientific Man Is Strictly A Sentimentalist. He Is A Sentimentalist In This Essential Sense, That He Is Soaked And Swept Away By Mere Associations.

The Real Argument Against Aristocracy Is That It Always Means The Rule Of The Ignorant. For The Most Dangerous Of All Forms Of Ignorance Is Ignorance Of Work.

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

The Idea Of Private Property Universal But Private, The Idea Of Families Free But Still Families, Of Domesticity Democratic But Still Domestic, Of One Man One House - This Remains The Real Vision And Magnet Of Mankind. The World May Accept Something More Official And General, Less Human And Intimate. But The World Will Be Like A Broken-hearted Woman Who Makes A Humdrum Marriage Because She May Not Make A Happy One; Socialism May Be The World's Deliverance, But It Is Not The World's Desire.

The Unconscious Democracy Of America Is A Very Fine Thing. It Is A True And Deep And Instinctive Assumption Of The Equality Of Citizens, Which Even Voting And Elections Have Not Destroyed.

Progress Should Mean That We Are Always Changing The World To Fit The Vision, Instead We Are Always Changing The Vision.

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.

All Democrats Object To Men Being Disqualified By The Accident Of Birth; Tradition Objects To Their Being Disqualified By The Accident Of Death.

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

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

Men Spoke Much In My Boyhood About Restricted Or Ruined Men Of Genius: And It Was Common To Say That Many A Man Was A Great Might-have-been. To Me It's A More Solid And Startling Fact That Any Man In The Street Is A Great Might-not-have-been.

The First Two Facts Which A Healthy Boy Or Girl Feels About Sex Are These: First That It Is Beautiful And Then That It Is Dangerous.

When Men Cease To Believe In God, They Will Believe In Anything

Nothing Can Ever Overcome That One Enormous Sex (female) Superiority That Even The Male Child Is Born Closer To His Mother Than To His Father.

A Madman Is Not Someone Who Has Lost His Reason But Someone Who Has Lost Everything But His Reason

Lost Everything

Where Does A Wise Man Hide A Leaf? In The Forest. But What Does He Do If There Is No Forest? He Grows A Forest To Hide It In.

The Big Corporation Is Not In The Least Remarkable For Efficiency; It Is Only Too Big To Be Blamed For Its Inefficiency.

The Word 'heresy' Not Only Means No Longer Being Wrong; It Practically Means Being Clear-headed And Courageous. The Word 'orthodoxy' Not Only No Longer Means Being Right; It Practically Means Being Wrong

When Giving Treats To Friends Or Children, Give Them What They Like, Emphatically Not What Is Good For Them.

History Is Not A Toboggan Slide, But A Road To Be Reconsidered And Even Retraced

We Have Had No Good Comic Operas Of Late, Because The Real World Has Been More Comic Than Any Possible Opera.

With Any Recovery From Morbidity There Must Go A Certain Healthy Humiliation.

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?

The Present Condition Of Fame Is Merely Fashion.

Children Feel The Whiteness Of The Lily With A Graphic And Passionate Clearness Which We Cannot Give Them At All. The Only Thing We Can Give Them Is Information-the Information That If You Break The Lily In Two It Won't Grow Again.

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

...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.

The Modern World Has Far Too Little Understanding Of The Art Of Keeping Young. Its Notion Of Progress Has Been To Pile One Thing On Top Of Another, Without Caring If Each Thing Was Crushed In Turn. People Forgot That The Human Soul Can Enjoy A Thing Most When There Is Time To Think About It And Be Thankful For It. And By Crowding Things Together They Lost The Sense Of Surprise; And Surprise Is The Secret Of Joy.

Trending Author

Frederick Carl Frieseke

Nicole Anderson

Bernardo Bertolucci

Category