01UndatedThey said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
03UndatedI mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,' answered Father Brown. 'The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
04UndatedSurely 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.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
05UndatedAs to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
06UndatedIn the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
07Undated[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
08UndatedModern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
09UndatedThe Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
10UndatedReligious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
11UndatedTradition 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 / quote ↗
12UndatedAccording 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 / quote ↗
13UndatedA man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
15UndatedThe Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
16UndatedMorality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
17UndatedSaint-worship is not the same as hero-worship; it is a much less dangerous thing than hero-worship. For hero-worship generally means the absorption or transmutation of some part, at any rate, of one's own original ideas of goodness under the heat and hypnotism of some strong personality. But saint-worship, especially when it is a worship of saints whom we know little or nothing about, is simply the worship of that tradition of goodness in which the saint's name has been embalmed; and into that empty mould our own natural idealism can much more easily be poured.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
18UndatedWithout education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
19UndatedNo man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
20UndatedThat is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
21UndatedAs regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
22UndatedIt is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal..The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared. There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt these maxims of daily life.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
23UndatedObciously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
24UndatedBut though I might fill the world with dragons I never had the slighest real doubt that heroes ought to fight with dragons. I must stop to challenge many child-lovers for cruelty to children. It is quite false to say that the child dislikes the fable because it is moral. Very often he likes the moral more than the fable. Adults are reading their own weary mockery into a mind still vigorous enough to be entirely serious.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
