There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.
Father Brown laid down his cigar and said carefully: "It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem."
A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.
It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.
Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found it without it.
For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the king.
It's not the world that's gotten so much worse, but the news coverage that's gotten so much better.
The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.
If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?
The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous.
Religious 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.
Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington ....
A man has been lucky in marrying the women he loves. But he is luckier in loving the woman he marries.
ed. Alvaro de Silva (1990)
Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.
When anyone goes about on his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that one man at any rate shall not be great.
The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and the princess lived happily, and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other. Most marriages, I think, are happy marriages; but there is no such thing as a contented marriage. The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.
The dispute that goes on between Macbeth and his wife about the murder of Duncan is almost word for word a dispute which goes on at any suburban breakfast table about something else. It is merely a matter of changing 'Infirm of purpose, give me the daggers' into 'Infirm of purpose, give me the postage stamps.'
ed. Dorothy Collins (1972)
The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.
I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.
Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and, eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.
CONJURER: Doctor, there are about a thousand reasons why I should not tell you how I really did that trick. But one will suffice, because it is the most practical of all.
DOCTOR: Well? And why shouldn't you tell me?
CONJURER:"Because you wouldn't believe me if I did.
This 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.
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
Full text.
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
Tradition 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 around.
A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer 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.
JACKSON: Truth is one's own conception of things.
CHESTERTON: The Big Blunder. All thought is an attempt to discover if one's own conception is true or not.
commentary on Holbrook Jackson's Platitudes in the Making (1997)
America has never been quite normal.
It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.
It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.
For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
"My Country, right or wrong" is a thing no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."
The one really rousing thing about human history is that, whether or no the proceedings go right, at any rate, the prophecies always go wrong. The promises are never fulfilled and the threats are never fulfilled. Even when good things do happen, they are never the good things that were guaranteed. And even when bad things happen, they are never the bad things that were inevitable. You may be quite certain that, if an old pessimist says the country is going to the dogs, it will go to any other animals except the dogs; if it be to the dromedaries or even the dragons. ... It was as if one weather prophet confidently predicted blazing sunshine and the other was equally certain of blinding fog; and they were both buried in a beautiful snow-storm and lay, fortunately dead, under a clear and starry sky.
We're all really dependent in nearly everything, and we all make a fuss about being independent in something.
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.
The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason.
What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
We are learning to do a great many clever things. ... The next great task will be to learn not to do them.
Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.
WIST is my collection of quotations I find meaningful, moving, amusing (intended or not), well-phrased, and/or to which I just say I "Wish I'd Said That." But just because I quote it here doesn't mean I actually agree with it. If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions, please don't hesitate to
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