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Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 19

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The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be

The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it - because it is a fact.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Children, Fear, Ideas

The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Brother, Sleep, Law

Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest....Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Memories, Believe, Autumn

My brain and this world don't fit each other; and there's an end of it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Brain, World, Fit

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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Wall, Sunset, Divorce

Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Real, Roots, Drawing

Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Christian, Jesus, Reality

There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Stars, Sunset, Men

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Women, Men, Literature

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Art, Pain, Pressure
Gilbert K. Chesterton (1909). “Heretics”

One elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Elephants, Plot, Odd
Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.43, Simon and Schuster

The modern mind will accept nothing on authority, but will accept anything on no authority. Say that the Bible or the Pope says so and it will be dismissed without further examination. But preface your remark with "I think I heard somewhere," or, try but fail to remember the name of some professor who might have said "such-and-such," and it will be immediately accepted as an unshakable fact.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Thinking, Names, Catholic

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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Humility, Men, Long

Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Spiritual, Drama, Theatre

If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Pride, Would Be, Preaching

Though I believe in liberalism, I find it difficult to believe in liberals.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Believe, Difficult, Liberalism

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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
America, Independence, Pieces

I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Baby, Birth Rate, Humanity

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Song, War, Men
Ballad of the White Horse (1911) bk. 2, p. 35

Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Saint, Generations

Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Doctors, Evil, Disease

It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Tired, May, Orthodoxy

In Catholicism, the pint, the pipe and the Cross can all fit together.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Beer, Together, Fit

Freethinkers are occasionally thoughtful, though never free.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Thoughtful, Freethinker

Liberty has produced scepticism, and scepticism has destroyed liberty. The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined. They thought they were only leaving it undefined, when they were really leaving it undefended.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
Leaving, Liberty, Lovers

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