“The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it."

 

A BRIEF SAMPLER OF GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON:(1874-1936)

“IF Americans can be divorced for 'incompatibility of temper,' I cannot conceive why they are not all divorced. I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible."

G.K. Chesterton, in photo with Frances Chesterton.

"Love is not blind – that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound. And the more it is bound the less it is blind."

G.K.Chesterton

“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind."

William Shakespeare 

Scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an Edwin Landseer painting, 1851. The beginning of Chesterton's essay on the play:

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream...The sentiment of such a play, so far as it can be summed up at all, can be summed up in one sentence. It is the mysticism of happiness. That is to say, it is the conception that as man lives upon a borderland he may find himself in the spiritual or supernatural atmosphere, not only through being profoundly sad or meditative, but by being extravagantly happy. The soul might be rapt out of the body in an agony of sorrow, or a trance of ecstasy; but it might also be rapt out of the body in a paroxysm of laughter. Sorrow we know can go beyond itself; so, according to Shakespeare, can pleasure go beyond itself and become something dangerous and unknown. And the reason that the logical and destructive modern school, of which Mr. Bernard Shaw is an example, does not grasp this purely exuberant nature of the comedies is simply that their logical and destructive attitude have rendered impossible the very experience of this preternatural exuberance. We cannot realize As You Like It if we are always considering it as we understand it. We cannot have A Midsummer Night’s Dream if our one object in life is to keep ourselves awake with the black coffee of criticism. The whole question which is balanced, and balanced nobly and fairly, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is whether the life of waking, or the life of vision, is the real life, the sine qua non of man. But it is difficult to see what superiority for the purpose of judging is possessed by people whose pride it is not to live the life of vision at all. At least it is questionable whether the Elizabethan did not know more about both worlds than the modern intellectual; it is not altogether improbable that Shakespeare would not only have had a clearer vision of the fairies, but would have shot very much straighter at a deer and netted much more money for his performances than a member of the Stage Society. In pure poetry and the intoxication of words, Shakespeare never rose higher than he rises in this play...

“The only inference is that for purposes of real public opinion the press is now a mere plutocratic oligarchy”

GK Chestertown,  Heretics (1905)

“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but for want of wonder.”

G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” ― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

Cheshire Cheese Pub which Chesterton frequented.

” In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, the right method is to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself...”

G.K. Chesterton from his essay on Job.

"The special mark of the modern world is not that it is sceptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it." 

GK Chesterton

“The public men and public organs are all tied already either to the cause of the big businesses or of the big bureaucracies; and very often to both, for they merge more and more into one another. Therefore they [also] control public expression.”

G.K. Chesterton

“There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were secrets in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in speech; or in any severance of a man from men. Nor is it easy for any words less stark and single-minded than those of the naked narrative even to hint at the horror of exaltation that lifted itself above the hill. Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or even to the beginning. And if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never understand in all the eternity they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God." 

G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” 

G.K. Chesterton: "The Everlasting Man,"

 "What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism. It is comparatively of little consequence that you occasionally break out and abuse other people, so long as you do not absolve yourself. The former is a natural collapse of human weakness; the latter is a blasphemous assumption of divine power. And in the modern world, where everybody is quarrelling about the urgent necessity of peace, nobody notices how this notion has really poisoned the relations of nations and men."

~G.K. Chesterton: “On Bright Old Things and Other Things,” in 'Sidelights on New London and Newer New York.'

“One can tell the divine origin of common sense by this simple test; that it is always crucified."

G.K. Chesterton: 'Daily News,' March 16, 1907.

"Easter, which is the spiritual New Year, should be a time for the understanding of new thoughts and the making of new things. The representatives of the rising generation can give us any number of negative reasons for not observing certain forms or traditions. They do not seem to see that it is their business as artists to create forms. They will not realise that it is their business as builders to found traditions. If the old conventions have really come to an end, the others have to do something much more difficult; they have to come to a beginning. I doubt if they have any clear idea about how to come to a beginning. They do not understand that positive creations are founded on positive creeds."

G.K. Chesterton (Illustrated London News, April 3, 1926)

from The World State, by G. K. Chesterton

...The International Idea, 

The largest and the clearest, 

Is welding all the nations now, 

Except the one that's nearest.

This compromise has long been known, 

This scheme of partial pardons, 

In ethical societies 

And small suburban gardens—

The villas and the chapels where 

I learned with little labour 

The way to love my fellow-man 

And hate my next-door neighbor.

“The greatest poets of the world have a certain serenity, because they have not bothered to invent a small philosophy, but have rather inherited a large philosophy. It is, nine times out of ten, a philosophy which very great men share with very ordinary men.”

G.K. Chesterton, in reference to Chaucer.

“Romance is perhaps the highest point of human expression, except indeed religion, to which it is closely allied. Romance resembles religion especially in this, that it is not only a simplification but a shortening of existence. Both romance and religion see everything as it were foreshortened; they see everything in an abrupt and fantastic perspective, coming to an apex. It is the whole essence of perspective that it comes to a point. Similarly, religion comes to a point—to the point. Thus religion is always insisting on the shortness of human life. But it does not insist on the shortness of human life as the pessimists insist on it. Pessimism insists on the shortness of human life in order to show that life is valueless. Religion insists on the shortness of human life in order to show that life is frightfully valuable—is almost horribly valuable. Pessimism says that life is so short that it gives nobody a chance; religion says that life is so short that it gives everybody his final chance."

G.K. Chesterton: Introduction to 'Nicholas Nickleby.'

“But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God. The fact is written all across human history; but it is written more plainly across that recent history of Russia; which was created by Lenin. There the Government is the God, and all the more the God, because it proclaims aloud in accents of thunder, like every other God worth worshipping, the one essential commandment: 'Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.'

GK Chesterton, “Christendom in Dublin" (1932)

The Object of a New Year

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards. Unless a man be born again, he shall by no means enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

G.K. Chesterton

"The sky is astonishing everywhere 

and should alone keep all men 

from materialism or indifference."

G K Chesterton, 

excerpt from "The Return of the Romans", 

“The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” G.K.Chesterton, Orthodoxy (The Maniac) 1908

“The Saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age. Yet each generation seeks its saint by instinct; and he is not what the people want, but rather what the people need… Therefore it is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.” 

G.K. CHESTERTON, ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers another" - G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered, 1908

WHEN THE business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother’s knee at the mere mention of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable...It is the reality that is often a fraud...

...It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle. Take one quite external case; the streets are noisy with taxicabs and motorcars; but this is not due to human activity but to human repose. There would be less bustle if there were more activity, if people were simply walking about. Our world would be more silent if it were more strenuous. And this which is true of the apparent physical bustle is true also of the apparent bustle of the intellect. Most of the machinery of modern language is labour-saving machinery; and it saves mental labour very much more than it ought. Scientific phrases are used like scientific wheels and piston-rods to make swifter and smoother yet the path of the comfortable. Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say “The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,” you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin “I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,” you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word “damn” than in the word “degeneration.”

Orthodoxy (1908) 

{“The more common a word is and the simpler its meaning, the bolder very likely is the original thought which it contains and the more intense the intellectual or poetic effort which went to its making.”

Owen Barfield, History in English Words}

"Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things...”

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes being corrected."

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies even if they become fashionable,” 

“Modern men are not familiar with the rational arguments for tradition, but they are familiar, almost wearily familiar with all the rational arguments for change,”

The modern newspaper proprietor is much more progressive than the Nation supposes; in fact he is a product of the progress that the Nation supports.  He is generally an uneducated man; but for all that he is an outcome of modern education. Most outcomes of modern education are uneducated men. Our education is uneducation; its whole tendency is to unteach people the traditions of their fathers. And it is this negative character, in the second-hand and second-rate culture of uneducated people in our time, that is more determining than any positive thing, especially so positive a thing a patriotism. The truth is that the mind of a man of this sort has been swept clear of all positive convictions by the skepticism at the end of the nineteenth century. It is true that such a skeptic gets his skepticism from authority; only it is, first, the wrong authority and, second, an authority he has not really consulted. He does not arrive at his free thought by thinking or even by reading, but by rumor.

G.K. Chesterton