"I know of nothing that is safe," said Basil composedly, "except, possibly—death."
—G.K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades.
Darwinianism
What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the Fall of Man they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now that they talk about the survival of the fittest they think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean. The Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about science."
—G.K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades.
Costume-Parties
They told me I must put on fancy dress; so I did put on fancy dress, according to my own taste and fancy. I put on the only costume I think fit for a man who has inherited the position of a gentleman, and yet has not entirely lost the feelings of one." In answer to a look of inquiry, he rose with a sweeping and downward gesture. "Sackcloth," he said; "and I would wear the ashes as well if they would stay on my bald head."
—G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much.
The Man Who Knew Too Much
"Don't be too hard on me merely because I know what society is. That's why I moon away my time over things like stinking fish."
The mysticism that was buried deep under all the cynicism of his experience was awake and moving in the depths.
"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."
"They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority."
"I have been in that room ever since," said Horne Fisher. "I am in it now. I won the election, but I never went to the House. My life has been a life in that little room on that lonely island. Plenty of books and cigars and luxuries, plenty of knowledge and interest and information, but never a voice out of that tomb to reach the world outside. I shall probably die there."
Something lay in the shadow at the foot of the ridge, and the man who knew too much knew what is worth knowing.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much.
The mysticism that was buried deep under all the cynicism of his experience was awake and moving in the depths.
"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."
"They would just swallow the skepticism because it was skepticism. Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority."
"I have been in that room ever since," said Horne Fisher. "I am in it now. I won the election, but I never went to the House. My life has been a life in that little room on that lonely island. Plenty of books and cigars and luxuries, plenty of knowledge and interest and information, but never a voice out of that tomb to reach the world outside. I shall probably die there."
Something lay in the shadow at the foot of the ridge, and the man who knew too much knew what is worth knowing.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Doing
He was only one of those young men who cannot support the burden of consciousness unless they are doing something, and whose conceptions of doing something are limited to a game of some kind.
—G.K. Chesterton, in The Man Who Knew Too Much.
—G.K. Chesterton, in The Man Who Knew Too Much.
Fragments
These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, What the Thunder Said.
—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, What the Thunder Said.
Being Good
The very vileness of the life of these ordered plebeian places bears witness to the victory of the human soul. I agree with you. I agree that they have to live in something worse than barbarism. They have to live in a fourth-rate civilization. But yet I am practically certain that the majority of people here are good people. And being good is an adventure far more violent and daring than sailing round the world.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades.
The Forgotten God
There is a striking [mythology] taken down word for word from a Red Indian in California ... in the middle of which is a sudden parenthesis saying that the sun and moon have to do something because 'It is ordered that way by the Great Spirit Who lives above the place of all.' That is exactly the attitude of most paganism towards God. He is something assumed and forgotten and remembered by accident; a habit possibly not peculiar to pagans.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.
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