K. Chesterton
K. Chesterton
men blue law
You!" he cried. "You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last--you are the people in power! You are the police--the great, fat smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken?
orthodoxy morality action
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
world half sometimes
It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.
art mean common-sense
We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
spiritual witty truth
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
heaven splits orthodoxy
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
men mad may
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.
book earth division
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.
tragedy deuces comic
Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?
men familiar findings
What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.
moving mean appreciate
Being 'contented' ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.
men aquariums literature
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
funny religious fall
It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
flower color-white shining
White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.