01c. 1905 ADThe 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 / quote ↗
02c. 1905 ADI am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
03c. 1905 ADMan is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
04c. 1905 ADA child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
05c. 1905 ADThe objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons, but children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
06c. 1905 ADEvery healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
07c. 1905 ADThe moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
08c. 1905 ADTen thousand women marched through the streets shouting, 'We will not be dictated to,' and went off and became stenographers.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
09c. 1905 ADStrike a glass and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it and it will endure a thousand years.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
10c. 1905 ADBut of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
11c. 1905 ADYou don't expect me," he said, "to revolutionize society on this lawn?"Syme looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly."No, I don't," he said; "but I suppose that if you were serious about your anarchism, that is exactly what you would do.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
12c. 1905 ADThe huge modern heresy is to alter the human soul to fit modern social conditions, instead of altering modern social conditions to fit the human soul.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
13c. 1905 ADModerate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
14c. 1905 ADof being strong and brave. The strong can not be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
15c. 1905 ADThere is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander, the strange flora and fauna, his own secret planet, the sort of thing he likes to think about. This general atmosphere, and pattern or a structure of growth, governs all his creations, however varied.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
16c. 1905 ADHe thought his detective brain as good as the criminal's, which was true. But he fully realised the disadvantage. "The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic," he said with a sour smile, and lifted his coffee cup to his lips slowly, and put it down very quickly. He had put salt in it.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
17c. 1905 AD, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must alwayshave been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it couldnever have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely becauseit might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
18c. 1905 ADThe future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already sovered with scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulant as humanity.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
19c. 1905 AD...it is the fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seems to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
20c. 1905 ADThis cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
21c. 1905 ADIt really is more natural to believe a preternatural story, that deals with things we don’t understand, than a natural story that contradicts things we do understand. Tell me that the great Mr Gladstone, in his last hours, was haunted by the ghost of Parnell, and I will be agnostic about it. But tell me that Mr Gladstone, when first presented to Queen Victoria, wore his hat in her drawing-room and slapped her on the back and offered her a cigar, and I am not agnostic at all. That is not impossible; it’s only incredible. But I’m much more certain it didn’t happen than that Parnell’s ghost didn’t appear; because it violates the laws of the world I do understand.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
22c. 1905 ADOne definition occurred to both of them—that he had come out into the light of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun. The sky above them was full of mythology. Heaven seemed deep enough to hold all the gods.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
23c. 1905 ADSuppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, "Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good--" At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
24c. 1905 ADThe modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. It may be thought 'dogmatic,' for instance, in some circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. But it is not thought "dogmatic" to assume the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. Progress happens to be one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought dogmatic.G.K. Chesterton / quote ↗
