Chesterton's account of how he came to believe the Apostles' Creed. He found historic Christian doctrine stranger, and more sane, than the ideas of his age.
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Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man's environment, but in man. Further, she has mainta…
If a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.
We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.
I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.
How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny sefishness an…
It's easy to be heavy; hard to be light.
Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.
Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as b…
Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.
All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. Pe…
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merel…
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.
To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.
Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same me…
Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form o…
Fairy tales make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
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.
20 quotes
Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man's environment, but in man. Further, she has mainta…
If a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.
We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.
I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.
How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny sefishness an…
It's easy to be heavy; hard to be light.
Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.
Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. This has been always the instinct of Christendom, and especially the instinct of Christian art. Remember how Fra Angelico represented all his angels, not only as b…
Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.
All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. Pe…
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merel…
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.
To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.
Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same me…
Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form o…
Fairy tales make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.
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.