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Quotables |
Dead or Alive?
Living things must constantly be broken up and destroyed; it is only the dead things than can be left alone. ("The Riddle of the Restoration" Lunacy and Letters)
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. ("The Five Deaths of the Faith" The Everlasting Man)
The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings. ("The New House" Alarms and Discursions)
People will tell you that theology became too elaborate because it was dead. Believe me, if it had been dead it would never have become elaborate; it is only the live tree that grows too many branches. ("The Hat and the Halo" The Thing)
Tradition, which some have called a dead thing, is really a thing far more living than the intellect. There is a dark kinship and brotherhood of all mankind which is much too deep to be called heredity or to be in any way explained in scientific formulae. ("Christmas Books" Appreciations)
The mark of the atheistic style is that it instinctively chooses the word which suggests that things are dead things; that things have no souls. Thus they will not speak of waging
war, which means willing it; they speak of the "outbreak of war," as if all the guns blew up without the men touching them. Instead of saying that employers pay less wages, which might pin the employers to some moral responsibility, they insist on talking about the "rise and fall" of wages. They will not speak of reform, but of development. The atheist style in letters always avoids talking of love or lust, which are things alive, and calls marriage or concubinage "the relations of the sexes"; as if a man and a woman were two wooden objects standing in a certain angle and attitude to each other, like a table and a chair.("The Flying Authority" Eugenics and Other Evils)
There is a chasm between the man who believes in the soul, in the sense of the will, and the man who only believes in what he calls law, and what I call fate. It is a difference of kind, like the difference between organic and inorganic matter; or, in other words, between dead things and living ones. (Illustrated London News Feb. 21, 1925)
Advice from Chesterton
It is always wiser to consider not so much why a thing is not enjoyable, as why we ourselves do not enjoy it. (Illustrated London News, Feb. 28, 1931)
Believe, amid whatever madness or moral failure, that your life and temperament have some object on earth. Believe that you have something to give the world which cannot otherwise be given. (“Philosophy of Browning,” Robert Browning)
Keep before your eyes the supreme adventure of virtue. If you are brave, think of the man who was braver than you. If you are kind, think of the man who was kinder than you. That is what was meant by having a patron saint. (“The War on Holidays,” Utopia of Usurers)
The first step towards making a man fit for his work is to make him afraid of it: this survives in the rite of marriage. (Illustrated London News, June 22, 1907)
Other people’s lives may easily be human documents. But a man’s own life is always a melodrama. (“The Time of Transition,” Charles Dickens)
Tragedies come rarely and soon fade away. But the fixed and eternal thing in human life is its comedy. The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man. (Illustrated London News, Feb. 10, 1906)
Good charity is certainly better than bad criticism. (Daily News, Mar. 1, 1901)
There is a thing called temper. It does colour one’s common life; the sky and landscape alter it; also it alters the sky and landscape. But temper is not the key of the universe; temper is not truth. A good-tempered man is not a saint; nor is a bad-tempered man necessarily a sinner. We all see truth as a light through very various windows; the question is, which of us wish to pull down the blinds? (Illustrated London News, Dec. 17, 1910)