Tyr-Ziu Saxnot
06-16-2012, 03:04 PM
The following are some of G.K.'s brilliant quotes. I have found many to be very helpful for me. With the hard times we are facing and possibly with even worse to come I thought these to be helpful to consider.
List you favorites or add new ones.--Tyr
G.K. Chesterton quotes-
“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant
“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?”
― G.K. Chesterton
“I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“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.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“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.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.”
― G.K. Chesterton
tags: fairy-tales 75 people liked it like “The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Fairy 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.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
tags: free-will, religion 66 people liked it like “Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The more truly we can see life as a fairytale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war with the dragon who is wasting fairyland.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can imagine how this can exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“In prosperity, our friends know us. In adversity, we know our friends”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“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.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, for all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“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.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged. ”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The man who kills a man kills a man.
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.”
― G.K. Chesterton
List you favorites or add new ones.--Tyr
G.K. Chesterton quotes-
“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant
“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?”
― G.K. Chesterton
“I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“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.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“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.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.”
― G.K. Chesterton
tags: fairy-tales 75 people liked it like “The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Fairy 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.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
tags: free-will, religion 66 people liked it like “Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The wild worship of lawlessness and the materialist worship of law end in the same void. Nietzsche scales staggering mountains, but he turns up ultimately in Tibet. He sits down beside Tolstoy in the land of nothing and Nirvana. They are both helpless—one because he must not grasp anything, and the other because he must not let go of anything. The Tolstoyan’s will is frozen by a Buddhist instinct that all special actions are evil. But the Nietzscheite’s will is quite equally frozen by his view that all special actions are good; for if all special actions are good, none of them are special. They stand at the crossroads, and one hates all the roads and the other likes all the roads. The result is—well, some things are not hard to calculate. They stand at the cross-roads.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The more truly we can see life as a fairytale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war with the dragon who is wasting fairyland.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can imagine how this can exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“In prosperity, our friends know us. In adversity, we know our friends”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“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.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, for all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“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.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged. ”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“The man who kills a man kills a man.
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.”
― G.K. Chesterton