Friday, September 6, 2013

More Favorite Chestertonianisms

"There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.

"Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.'

"Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it."

"Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen."

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types—the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution."

"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man."

"Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable."

“Feminism is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”

“It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.”

“Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.”More Chesterton

Yet More Favorite Chestertonianisms

“There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.”

“Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance.”

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."

"Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere."

"The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."

"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."

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

"You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world."

“There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”