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We Must Be Clear About What We Want To Paint. This Adds A Further Principle To Our Previous List Of Principles. We Have Said We Must Be Fond Of This World, Even In Order To Change It.

-Gilbert K. Chesterton

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We Must Be Clear

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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We Must Be Clear About What We Want To Paint. This Adds A Further Principle To Our Previous List Of Principles. We Have Said We Must Be Fond Of This World, Even In Order To Change It.

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More From Gilbert K. Chesterton

Aristocracy: Government By The Badly Educated.

If The Barricades Went Up In Our Streets And The Poor Became Masters, I Think The Priests Would Escape, I Fear The Gentlemen Would; But I Believe The Gutters Would Simply Be Running With The Blood Of Philanthropists.

The Vault Above Us Is Not Deaf Because The Universe Is An Idiot; The Silence Is Not The Heartless Silence Of An Endless And Aimless World. Rather The Silence Around Us Is A Small And Pitiful Stillness Like The Prompt Stillness Of A Sick Room. We Are Perhaps Permitted Tragedy As A Sort Of Merciful Comedy, Because The Frantic Energy Of Divine Things Would Knock Us Down Like A Drunken Farce. We Can Take Our Own Tears More Lightly Than We Could Take The Tremendous Levities Of The Angels. So We Sit Perhaps In A Starry Chamber Of Silence While The Laughter Of The Heavens Is Too Loud For Us To Hear.

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.

All Architecture Is Great Architecture After Sunset.

All Slang Is Metaphor, And All Metaphor Is Poetry.

Truth Must Necessarily Be Stranger Than Fiction, For Fiction Is The Creation Of The Human Mind And Therefore Congenial To It.

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.

To Downgrade The Human Mind Is Bad Theology.

Most Americans Are Born Drunk, And Really Require A Little Wine Or Beer To Sober Them.

Variability Is One Of The Virtues Of A Woman. It Avoids The Crude Requirement Of Polygamy. So Long As You Have One Good Wife You Are Sure To Have A Spiritual Harem".

When A Man Ceases To Believe In God, He Does Not Believe In Nothing. He Believes In Everything.

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

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

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.

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

You Cannot Grow A Beard In A Moment Of Passion.

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.

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

There Is A Law Written In The Darkest Of The Books Of Life, And It Is This: If You Look At A Thing Nine Hundred And Ninety-nine Times, You Are Perfectly Safe; If You Look At It The Thousandth Time, You Are In Frightful Danger Of Seeing It For The First Time.

There Is Nothing Harder To Learn Than Painting And Nothing Which Most People Take Less Trouble About Learning. An Art School Is A Place Where About Three People Work With Feverish Energy And Everybody Else Idles To A Degree That I Should Have Conceived Unattainable By Human Nature.

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

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.

The Disadvantage Of Men Not Knowing The Past Is That They Do Not Know The Present. History Is A Hill Or High Point Of Vantage, From Which Alone Men See The Town In Which They Live Or The Age In Which They Are Living.

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 . . .

The Party System Was Founded On One National Notion Of Fair Play. It Was The Notion That Folly And Futility Should Be Fairly Divided Between Both Sides.

We Can’t Turn Life Into A Pleasure. But We Can Choose Such Pleasures As Are Worthy Of Us And Our Immortal Souls.

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.

It [feminism] Is Mixed Up With A Muddled Idea That Women Are Free When They Serve Their Employers But Slaves When They Help Their Husbands.

The Long Words Are Not The Hard Words, It Is The Short Words That Are Hard. There Is Much More Metaphysical Subtlety In The Word "damn" Than In The Word "degeneration."

If Our Caricaturists Do Not Hate Their Enemies, It Is Not Because They Are Too Big To Hate Them, But Because Their Enemies Are Not Big Enough To Hate.

What People Call Impartiality May Simply Mean Indifference, And What People Call Partiality May Simply Mean Mental Activity.

In The Fairy Tale, An Incomprehensible Happiness Rests Upon An Incomprehensible Condition. A Box Is Opened And All Evils Fly Out. A Word Is Forgotten And Cities Perish. A Lamp Is Lit And Love Flies Away. An Apple Is Eaten And The Hope Of God Is Gone.

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.

Dogma Is Actually The Only Thing That Cannot Be Separated From Education. It Is Education. A Teacher Who Is Not Dogmatic Is Simply A Teacher Who Is Not Teaching. There Are No Uneducated People; Only Most People Are Educated Wrong. The True Task Of Culture Today Is Not A Task Of Expansion, But Of Selection-and-rejection. The Educationist Must Find A Creed And Teach It.

The Great Misfortune Of The Modern English Is Not At All That They Are More Boastful Than Other People (they Are Not); It Is That They Are Boastful About Those Particular Things Which Nobody Can Boast Of Without Losing Them.

Why Be Something To Everybody When You Can Be Everything To Somebody?

We Have All Forgotten What We Really Are. All That We Call Common Sense And Rationality And Practicality And Positivism Only Means That For Certain Dead Levels Of Our Life We Forget That We Have Forgotten. All That We Call Spirit And Art And Ecstasy Only Means That For One Awful Instant We Remember That We Forget.

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

The Man Who Lives In A Small Community Lives In A Much Larger World... The Reason Is Obvious. In A Large Community We Can Choose Our Companions. In A Small Community Our Companions Are Chosen For Us.

Reason Is Always A Kind Of Brute Force; Those Who Appeal To The Head Rather Than The Heart, However Pallid And Polite, Are Necessarily Men Of Violence. We Speak Of 'touching' A Man's Heart, But We Can Do Nothing To His Head But Hit It.

The Wine They Drink In Paradise They Make In Haute Lorraine.

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.

Posting A Letter And Getting Married [sic] Are Among The Few Things Left That Are Entirely Romantic; For To Be Entirely Romantic, A Thing Must Be Irrevocable

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

We Fear Men So Much, Because We Fear God So Little. One Fear Cures Another. When Man's Terror Scares You, Turn Your Thoughts To The Wrath Of God.

Art, Like Morality, Consists In Drawing The Line Somewhere.

The Rich Are The Scum Of The Earth In Every Country.

Scum Of The Earth

It Is True That There Is A Thing Crudely Called Charity, Which Means Charity To The Deserving Poor; But Charity To The Deserving Is Not Charity At All, But Justice. It Is The Undeserving Who Require It, And The Ideal Either Does Not Exist At All, Or Exists Wholly For Them.

In Our Time The Blasphemies Are Threadbare. Pessimism Is Now Patently, As It Always Was Essentially, More Commonplace Than Piety. Profanity Is Now More Than An Affectation - It Is A Convention. The Curse Against God Is Exercise I In The Primer Of Minor Poetry.

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.

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.

Art Is The Signature Of Man.

Very Few Reputations Are Gained By Unsullied Virtue.

Impartiality Is A Pompous Name For Indifference, Which Is An Elegant Name For Ignorance.

...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.

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

We Make Our Friends; We Make Our Enemies; But God Makes Our Next Door Neighbour.

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

Buddhism Is Not A Creed, It Is A Doubt.

The Great Saint May Be Said To Mix All His Thoughts With Thanks. All Goods Look Better When They Look Like Gifts.

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

The Main Point Of Christianity Was This: That Nature Is Not Our Mother: Nature Is Our Sister.

In A World Flagrant With The Failures Of Civilization, What Is There Particularly Immortal About Our Own?

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

I Have Formed A Very Clear Conception Of Patriotism. I Have Generally Found It Thrust Into The Foreground By Some Fellow Who Has Something To Hide In The Background. I Have Seen A Great Deal Of Patriotism; And I Have Generally Found It The Last Refuge Of The Scoundrel.

He Said He Didn't Very Well Understand How George Was Going To Sleep Any More Than He Did Now, Seeing That There Were Only Twenty-four Hours In Each Day.

The First Fact About The Celebration Of A Birthday Is That It Is A Way Of Affirming Defiantly, And Even Flamboyantly, That It Is A Good Thing To Be Alive.

Tolerance Is The Virtue Of Those Who Don't Believe Anything.

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

I Tell You Naught For Your Comfort, Yea, Naught For Your Desire, Save That The Sky Grows Darker Yet And The Sea Rises Higher.

The Great Gaels Of Ireland Are The Men That God Made Mad, For All Their Wars Are Merry, And All Their Songs Are Sad.

Let Your Religion Be Less Of A Theory And More Of A Love Affair.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The Highest And Noblest Thing That History Can Be Is A Good Story.

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

Thanks Are The Highest Form Of Thought.

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?

It Is Human To Err; And The Only Final And Deadly Error, Among All Our Errors, Is Denying That We Have Ever Erred.

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

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

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.

Theology Is Only Thought Applied To Religion.

[buddhism And Christianity] Are In One Sense Parallel And Equal; As A Mound And A Hollow, As A Valley And A Hill. There Is A Sense In Which That Sublime Despair Is The Only Alternative To That Divine Audacity. It Is Even True That The Truly Spiritual And Intellectual Man Sees It As Sort Of Dilemma; A Very Hard And Terrible Choice. There Is Little Else On Earth That Can Compare With These For Completeness. And He Who Does Not Climb The Mountain Of Christ Does Indeed Fall Into The Abyss Of Buddha.

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 Truth Is That It Is Our Attitude Towards Children That Is Right, And Our Attitude Towards Grown-up People That Is Wrong.

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

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

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

Customs Are Generally Unselfish. Habits Are Nearly Always Selfish.

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.

We Actually Love Ourselves More Than We Love Joy.

The Center Of Every Man's Existence Is A Dream. Death, Disease, Insanity, Are Merely Material Accidents, Like A Toothache Or A Twisted Ankle. That These Brutal Forces Always Besiege And Often Capture The Citadel Does Not Prove That They Are The Citadel.

There Is One Thing Which Gives Radiance To Everything. It Is The Idea Of Something Around The Corner.

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

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.

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

I Believe What Really Happens In History Is This: The Old Man Is Always Wrong; And The Young People Are Always Wrong About What Is Wrong With Him. The Practical Form It Takes Is This: That, While The Old Man May Stand By Some Stupid Custom, The Young Man Always Attacks It With Some Theory That Turns Out To Be Equally Stupid.

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.

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

Man Seems To Be Capable Of Great Virtues But Not Of Small Virtues; Capable Of Defying His Torturer But Not Of Keeping His Temper.

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.

Ivory May Not Be So White As Snow, But The Whole Arctic Continent Does Not Make Ivory Black.

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

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

There Are No Wise Few; For In All Men Rages The Folly Of The Fall. Take Your Strongest, Happiest, Handsomest, Best Born, Best Bred, Best Instructed Men On Earth And Give Them Special Power For Half An Hour And Because They Are Men They Will Begin To [perform] Badly.

Tradition Means Giving Votes To The Most Obscure Of All Classes, Our Ancestors. It Is The Democracy Of The Dead. Tradition Refuses To Submit To That Arrogant Oligarchy Who Merely Happen To Be Walking Around.

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

And All Over The World, The Old Literature, The Popular Literature, Is The Same. It Consists Of Very Dignified Sorrow And Very Undignified Fun. Its Sad Tales Are Of Broken Hearts; Its Happy Tales Are Of Broken Heads.

So Far As A Man May Be Proud Of A Religion Rooted In Humility, I Am Very Proud Of My Religion; I Am Especially Proud Of Those Parts Of It That Are Most Commonly Called Superstition. I Am Proud Of Being Fettered By Antiquated Dogmas And Enslaved By Dead Creeds (as My Journalistic Friends Repeat With So Much Pertinacity), For I Know Very Well That It Is The Heretical Creeds That Are Dead, And That It Is Only The Reasonable Dogma That Lives Long Enough To Be Called Antiquated.

Never Invoke The Gods Unless You Really Want Them To Appear. It Annoys Them Very Much.

Poets Do Not Go Mad, But Chess Players Do.

I Defy Anybody To Say What Are The Rights Of A Citizen, If They Do Not Include The Control Of His Own Diet In Relation To His Own Health.

I've Been To Every Park In Every City And Not Seen A Statue To A Committee.

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

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.

He Must Not Merely Cling To Life, For Then He Will Be A Coward, And Will Not Escape. He Must Not Merely Wait For Death, For Then He Will Be A Suicide, And Will Not Escape. He Must Seek His Life In A Spirit Of Furious Indifference To It.

The Universe Is The Most Extraordinary Masterpiece Ever Constructed By Nobody.

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

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.

A Man Was Meant To Be Doubtful About Himself, But Undoubting About The Truth; This Has Been Reversed. Nowadays The Part Of A Man That A Man Does Assert Is Exactly The Part He Ought Not To Assert - Himself. The Part He Doubts Is Exactly The Part He Ought Not To Doubt - The Divine Reason.

People Generally Quarrel Because They Cannot Argue.

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.

We Are All Ordinary People. And It's The Extraordinary People Who Know It.

Somehow One Must Love The World Without Being Worldly.

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

There Nearly Always Is A Method In Madness.

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

I Do Not Feel Any Contempt For An Atheist, Who Is Often A Man Limited And Constrained By His Own Logic To A Very Sad Simplification.

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

When Belief In God Becomes Difficult, The Tendency Is To Turn Away From Him; But In Heaven's Name To What?

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

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."

Think Of All Those Ages Through Which Men Have Had The Courage To Die, And Then Remember That We Have Actually Fallen To Talking About Having The Courage To Live.

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

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

If A Rhinoceros Were To Enter This Restaurant Now, There Is No Denying He Would Have Great Power Here. But I Should Be The First To Rise And Assure Him That He Had No Authority Whatever.

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.

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

Adventure Is The Champagne Of Life.

Inspirational Life

When We Reverence Anything In The Mature, It Is Their Virtues Or Their Wisdom, And This Is An Easy Matter. But We Reverence The Faults And Follies Of Children. We Should Probably Come Considerably Nearer To The True Conception Of Things If We Treated All Grown-up Persons, Of All Titles And Types, With Precisely That Dark Affection And Dazed Respect With Which We Treat The Infantile Limitations.

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

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.

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

Listening And Hearing

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

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.

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

When A Politician Is In Opposition He Is An Expert On The Means To Some End; And When He Is In Office He Is An Expert On The Obstacles To It.

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

Mankind Is Not A Tribe Of Animals To Which We Owe Compassion. Mankind Is A Club To Which We Owe Our Subscription.

All Science, Even The Divine Science, Is A Sublime Detective Story. Only It Is Not Set To Detect Why A Man Is Dead; But The Darker Secret Of Why He Is Alive.

Real Development Is Not Leaving Things Behind, As On A Road, But Drawing Life From Them, As From A Root.

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.

There Is At The Back Of Every Artist’s Mind Something Like A Pattern And A Type Of Architecture. The Original Quality In Any Man Of Imagination Is Imagery. It Is A Thing Like The Landscape Of His Dreams; The Sort Of World He Would Like To Make Or In Which He Would Like To Wander, The Strange Flora And Fauna, His Own Secret Planet, The Sort Of Thing He Likes To Think About. This General Atmosphere, And Pattern Or A Structure Of Growth, Governs All His Creations, However Varied.

Most Americans Are Born Drunk, And Really Require A Little Wine Or Beer To Sober Them. They Have A Sort Of Permanent Intoxication From Within, A Sort Of Invisible Champagne. Americans Do Not Need To Drink To Inspire Them To Do Anything, Though They Do Sometimes, I Think, Need A Little For The Deeper And More Delicate Purpose Of Teaching Them How To Do Nothing.

Faith Means Believing The Unbelievable.

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

The Vulgar Man Is Always The Most Distinguished, For The Very Desire To Be Distinguished Is Vulgar.

...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.

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.

I May Not Practice What I Preach But God Forbid I Should Preach What I Practice

The Declaration Of Independence Dogmatically Bases All Rights On The Fact That God Created All Men Equal; And It Is Right; For If They Were Not Created Equal, They Were Certainly Evolved Unequal. There Is No Basis For Democracy Except In A Dogma About The Divine Origin Of Man.

The Miser Is The Man Who Starves Himself And Everybody Else, In Order To Worship Wealth In Its Dead Form, As Distinct From Its Living Form.

A Great Curse Has Fallen Upon Modern Life With The Discovery Of The Vastness Of The Word Education.

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.

Different Experiences

The Modern World Is A Crowd Of Very Rapid Racing Cars All Brought To A Standstill And Stuck In A Block Of Traffic.

The Modern World Is Full Of The Old Christian Virtues Gone Mad. The Virtues Have Gone Mad Because They Have Been Isolated From Each Other And Are Wandering Alone. Thus Some Scientists Care For Truth; And Their Truth Is Pitiless. Thus Some Humanitarians Only Care For Pity; And Their Pity (i Am Sorry To Say) Is Often Untruthful.

We Should Always Endeavor To Wonder At The Permanent Thing, Not At The Mere Exception. We Should Be Startled By The Sun, And Not By The Eclipse. We Should Wonder Less At The Earthquake, And Wonder More At The Earth.

A Great City Is The Place To Escape The True Drama Of Provincial Life, And Find Solace In Fantasy.

The Only Defensible War Is A War Of Defense.

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.

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

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

Boyhood Is A Most Complex And Incomprehensible Thing. Even When One Has Been Through It, One Does Not Understand What It Was. A Man Can Never Quite Understand A Boy, Even When He Has Been The Boy.

No Sane Person, I Hope, Would Accuse Me Of Saying That Every Distributist Must Drink Beer; Especially If He Could Brew His Own Cider Or Found Claret Better For His Health. But I Do Most Emphatically Scorn And Scout The Vulgar Refinement That Regards Beer As Something Unseemly And Humiliating. And I Would Shout The Name Of Beer A Hundred Times A Day, To Shock All The Snobs Who Have So Shameful A Sense Of Shame.

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

The Trouble With Always Trying To Preserve The Health Of The Body Is That It Is So Difficult To Do Without Destroying The Health Of The Mind.

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

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

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

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

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.

For My Part, I Should Be Inclined To Suggest That The Chief Object Of Education Should Be To Restore Simplicity. If You Like To Put It So, The Chief Object Of Education Is Not To Learn Things; Nay, The Chief Object Of Education Is To Unlearn Things.

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.

Jokes Are Generally Honest. Complete Solemnity Is Always Dishonest.

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

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.

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

Internationalism

Truth Can Understand Error, But Error Cannot Understand Truth.

Modern Nature-worship Is All Upside Down. Trees And Fields Ought To Be The Ordinary Things; Terraces And Temples Ought To Be Extraordinary. I Am On The Side Of The Man Who Lives In The Country And Wants To Go To London.

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

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.

It Is The Main Earthly Business Of A Human Being To Make His Home, And The Immediate Surroundings Of His Home, As Symbolic And Significant To His Own Imagination As He Can.

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.

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.

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