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Quote by G.K. Chesterton

“You say the poet is in the clouds; but so is the thunderbolt.”

Quote by G.K. Chesterton

Book:The Victorian Age in Literature

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The Victorian Age in Literature

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G.K. Chesterton

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“Macaulay took it for granted that common sense required some kind of theology, while Huxley took it for granted that common sense meant having none. Macaulay, it is said, never talked about his religion: but Huxley was always talking about the religion he hadn’t got.”

Religion Chesterton

Book:The Victorian Age in Literature

Source: The Victorian Age in Literature

“A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes’ intelligent talk is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create; for he is making an outline and a shape. Mahomet created, when he forbade wine but allowed five wives: he created a very big thing, which we have still to deal with. The first French Republic created, when it affirmed property and abolished peerages; France still stands like a square, four-sided building which Europe has besieged in vain. The men of the Oxford Movement would have been horrified at being compared either with Moslems or Jacobins. But their subconscious thirst was for something that Moslems and Jacobins had and ordinary Angelicans had not: the exalted excitement of consistency. If you were a Moslem you were not a Bacchanal. If you were a Republican you were not a peer. And so the Oxford men, even in their first and dimmest stages, felt that if you were a Churchman you were not a Dissenter. [...] It was an appeal to reason: reason said that if a Christian had a feast-day he must have a fast-day too. Otherwise, all days out to be alike; and this was the very Utilitarianism against which their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault.”

Book:The Victorian Age in Literature

Source: The Victorian Age in Literature

“We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense that they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an eternal protest against the vulgarity of utilitarianism.”

Science Knowledge Essays Chesterton

Book:As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

Source: As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“To lose the sense of repugnance from one thing, or regard for another, is exactly so far as it goes to relapse into the vegetation or to return to the dust.”

Essays Chesterton Shamelessness

Book:As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

Source: As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“Rituals and festivals, like those of a great national or international wedding-day, contain a thousand things to remind us that our countrymen inherit an experience much more lively and complex than any such local and temporary solution; and warn us against allowing the present to become more narrow than the past.”

Essays Weddings Chesterton

Book:As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

Source: As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“The realms of the soul and the spirit are so spacious and unending that this little bit of physical discomfort and suffering really doesn’t matter all that much. I do not feel I have been robbed of my freedom; essentially no one can do me any harm at all.”

Faith Spirituality Self Help Self Improvement

Author:Etty Hillesum

“Most of my life is passed in discovering with a deadly surprise that I was quite right.”

Wisdom Chesterton

Book:Selected essays

Source: Selected essays

“Chesterton's plain statement is like one of his paradoxes without the simplicity: but that's a paradox in itself. It's an area that the dear, bibulous, chortling old boy gets you into. He invited being patronized, but it was a stratagem. He was serious, always. He just didn't seem to be.”

Paradox Chesterton

Book:Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

Source: Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

“...boundaries are the most beautiful things in the world. To love anything is to love its boundaries; thus, children will always play on the edge of anything. ... For when we have come to the end of a thing we have come to the beginning of it.”

Boundaries Chesterton Tremendous Trifles

Author:G.K. Chesterton

“Sólo el ignorante en cosas de la razón puede creer que se razone sin sólidos e indisputables primeros principios.”

Chesterton El Candor Del Padre Brown

Book:El candor del padre Brown (Literatura universal)

Source: El candor del padre Brown (Literatura universal)