Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 21

• The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Song, War, Men

  Ballad of the White Horse (1911) bk. 2, p. 35

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• He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Mad, May

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.77, Simon and Schuster

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• St Thomas (Aqinas) loved books and lived on books... When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, ‘I have understood every page I ever read’.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Book, Pages, St Thomas

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• Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  God, Animal, Men

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• One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Flower, Ignorance, Knowledge

  "Robert Browning". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1903.

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• Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a grey day a "colourless" day. Grey is a colour, and can be a very powerful and pleasing colour.... A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun; so is a green tree, if it comes to that. But the grey umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style and shape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, and another grey like dove’s plumage. One may seem grey like the deathly frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Powerful, Sky, Tree

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• Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Women, Men, Literature

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• You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than any one else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes been objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' wars.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Country, War, Men

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.236, Simon and Schuster

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• The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Past, Men, Knowing

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• There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Science, Enemy, Events

  "The Flying Inn". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1914.

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• If a man does not talk to himself, it is because he is not worth talking to.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Talking, Doe

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• The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wisdom, Past, Men

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• Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Pride, Thinking, Idiot

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.30, Simon and Schuster

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• They say travel broadens the mind, but you must have the mind.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Travel, Mind

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• Sir Hiram Maxim is a genuine and typical example of the man of science, romantic, excitable, full of real but somewhat obvious poetry, a little hazy in logic and philosophy, but full of hearty enthusiasm and an honorable simplicity. He is, as he expresses it, "an old and trained engineer," and is like all of the old and trained engineers I have happened to come across, a man who indemnifies himself for the superhuman or inhuman concentration required for physical science by a vague and dangerous romanticism about everything else.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Philosophy, Real, Science

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• It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Order, Roots

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• I should favour anything that would increase the present enormous authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The average woman...is a despot; the average man is a serf.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Women, Home, Average

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• Man 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 state of mind; Praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; Joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live? Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Grief, Holiday

  "Orthodoxy". Book by G. K. Chesterton, Chapter VIII. "The Romances of Orthodoxy", 1908.

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• A tragedy means always a mans struggle with that which is stronger than man.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Struggle, Mean, Men

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• In Catholicism, the pint, the pipe and the Cross can all fit together.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Beer, Together, Fit

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• The modern mind will accept nothing on authority, but will accept anything on no authority. Say that the Bible or the Pope says so and it will be dismissed without further examination. But preface your remark with "I think I heard somewhere," or, try but fail to remember the name of some professor who might have said "such-and-such," and it will be immediately accepted as an unshakable fact.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Thinking, Names, Catholic

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• So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalistic friends repeat with so much pertinacity), for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Humility, Men, Long

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• If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Pride, Would Be, Preaching

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• Though I believe in liberalism, I find it difficult to believe in liberals.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Believe, Difficult, Liberalism

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• There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies. I may be wrong, as I am no commericial expert, but I have not heard of them as yet.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Saint, Culture, May

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