01UndatedOne of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
02UndatedJust 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.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
03UndatedAll we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
04UndatedThe thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statues, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the government will really help it to persecute its heretics…I am not frightened of the word ‘persecution’…It is a term of legal fact. If it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof—then our priests are not now persecuting, but our doctors are.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
05UndatedWhile most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
06UndatedSatire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
08UndatedThere is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
10UndatedThere are books showing men how to succeed in everything they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
11UndatedI 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.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
12UndatedA man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
13UndatedEngland and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no other god to call on… the truth of the whole matter is very simple. Nationality exists, and has nothing in the world to do with race. Nationality is a thing like a church or a secret society. It is the product of the human soul and will; it is a spiritual product. And there are men… who would think anything and do anything rather than admit anything could be a spiritual product.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
14UndatedThis man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
15UndatedNo man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
16UndatedThrough all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
17UndatedAs for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
18UndatedThe issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
19UndatedA man who says that no patriot should attack the [war] until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men…he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all…Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
20UndatedShe(Joan of Arc) put her dreams and her sentiment into her aims, where they ought to be; she put her practicality into her practice. Ine modern Imperial wars, the case is reversed. Our dreams, our aims are always, we insist, quite practical. It is our practice that is dreamy.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
21Undated...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
22UndatedThe men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
23UndatedHumour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
24Undatedit will be generally found that the popular joke is not true to the letter, but is true to the spirit. The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
