From: slinn@controls.ccd.harris.com (Scott Linn)
Newsgroups: alt.quotations
Subject: G. K. Chesterton
Date: 5 Jan 93 17:01:29 GMT
Organization: Harris Controls Division

Quotations from G. K. Chesterton's _Orthodoxy_ (Image Books:
Garden City, NY, 1959)

It was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person 
only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation. p. 9

How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and 
yet at home in it? p. 10

It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a 
griffin, a creature who does not exist.  It is another thing 
to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take 
pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't. p.11

When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the 
ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. p. 12

I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce 
me to read it. p. 12

These essays are concerned only to discuss the actual fact 
that the central Christian theology (sufficently summarized 
in the Apostles' Creed) is the best root of energy and sound 
ethics.  pp 12-13

This is not an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly 
autobiography. p. 13

. . . believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of 
a rotter. p. 14

Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-
confidence is a weakness. p. 14

Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there 
was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing. p. 15

If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite 
happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher 
can only draw one of two deductions.  He must either deny 
the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny 
the present union between God and man, as all Christians 
do.  The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic 
solution to deny the cat. p. 15

I mean that as all thoughts and theories were once judged 
by whether they tended to make a man lose his soul, so for 
our present purpose all modern thoughts and theories may be 
judged by whether they tend to make a man lose his wits. pp. 15-16

In short, oddities only strike ordinary people.  Oddities do
not strike odd people.  This is why ordinary people have a 
much more exciting time; while odd people are always 
complaining about the dulness of life. p. 16

The fairy tale discusses what a sane man will do in a mad
world.  The sober realistic novel of to-day discusses what
an essential lunatic will do in a dull world. p. 16

Perhaps the strongest case of all is this:  that only one great
English poet went mad, Cowper.  And he was definitely driven mad
by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination.  Poetry
was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him
in health.  He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell
to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide
waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse.  He was damned
by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin. p. 17

[As a Calvinist, I disagree with his interpretation of
Calvin, but it's still a pretty neat quotation! :->]

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 heat that splits. pp. 17-18

If the madman could for an instant become careless, he would
become sane.  Every one who has had the misfortune to talk with
people in the heart or on the edge of mental disorder, knows that
their most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail;
a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate 
than a maze.  If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable 
that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves
all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with
good judgment.  He is not hampered by a sense of humour or
by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience.  He is
the more logical for losing certain sane affections.  Indeed,
the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one.
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason.  The madman
is the man who has lost everything except his reason. p. 19

[Speaking of the madman]
He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea:  he is 
sharpened to one painful point. p. 22

Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to 
believe in determinism.  I think Mr. McCabe a slave because
he is not allowed to believe in fairies. p. 24

The man who begins to think without the proper first principles
goes mad; he begins to think at the wrong end.  p. 27

Mysticism keeps men sane. p. 28

As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness,
we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery
and of health.  Buddhism is cetripetal, but Christianity is
centrifugal:  it breaks out.  For the circle is perfect and infinite
in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never
be larger or smaller.  But the cross, though it has at its heart 
a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever
without altering its shape.  Because it has a paradox in its centre
it can grow without changing.  The circle returns upon itself
and is bound.  The cross opens its arms to the four winds;
it is a signpost for free travellers.  pp. 28-29
 
Torquemada tortured people physically for the sake of moral
truth.  Zola tortured people morally for the sake of 
physical truth.  But in Torquemada's time there was at least
a system that could to some extent make righteousness and peace
kiss each other.  Now they do not even bow.  p. 31

If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask
yourself the question, "Why should _anything_ go right;
even observation and deduction?  Why should not good logic be 
as misleading as bad logic?  They are both movements in the
brain of a bewildered ape?"  p. 33

In so far as religion is gone, reason is going. p. 34

They [religion and reason] are both methods of proof which
cannot themselves be proved.  And in the act of destroying the
idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of
that human authority by which we do a long-division sum.  With
a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre
off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it. p. 34

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which,
if it destroys anything, destroys itself.  Evolution is either
an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things
came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack
upon thought itself.  If evolution destroys anything, it does not 
destroy religion but rationalism.  If evolution simply means that
a positive thng called an ape turned very slowly into a positive 
thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox;
for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly,
especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.  But
if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing
as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change
into.  It means that there is no such thing as a thing.  At best,
there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and
anything.  This is an attack not upon faith, but upon mind; you
cannot think if there are no things to think about.  You cannot
think if you are not separate from the subject of thought.  Descartes
said, "I think; therefore I am."  The philosophic evolutionist
reverses and negatives the epigram.  He says, "I am not; there-
fore I cannot think."  pp. 34-35

. . . Nietzsche denied egoism simply by preaching it.  To preach
anything is to give it away.  First, the egoist calls life a 
war without mercy, and then he takes the greatest possible
trouble to drill his enemies in war.  To preach egoism is to
practise altruism. p. 38

They cannot will, they can hardly wish. p. 39

The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into
a world of limits. p. 40

Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to 
break out of the prison of their three sides.  If a 
triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to
a lamentable end. p. 40

A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a
peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical
principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. p. 41

Every man who will not have softening of the heart must a least
have softening of the brain. p. 42

Because we cannot believe in what a saint did, we are to 
pretend that we know exactly what he felt. p. 43

Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something,
while they are wild speculators who do nothing. p. 44

Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes,
our ancestors.  It is the democracy of the dead.  Tradition
refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of
those who merely happen to be walking about.  All
democrats object to men being disqualified by accident of
birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the
accident of death. p. 48

The ancient Greeks voted by stones; these shall vote by 
tombstones.  It is all quite regular and official, for most
tombstones, like most ballot papers, are marked with a
cross. p. 48

We have always in our fairy tales kept this sharp distinction
between the science of mental relations, in which there really
are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there
are no laws, but only weird repititions.  We believe in bodily
miricles, but not in mental impossibilities.  We believe that a
Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven; but that does not at all 
confuse our convictions on the philosophical question of how
many beans make five. p. 51

It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; 
it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has 
never to tired of making them. p. 60

I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that 
they are wonderful:  now I began to think them miracles in the
stricter sense that they were _wilful_.  I mean that they were,
or might be, repeated exercises of some will.  In short, I had
always believed that the world involved magic:  now I thought
that perhaps it involved a magician.  p. 61

I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain
itself. ... Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a 
meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. ... Third,
I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite
of its defects, such as dragons.  Fourth, that the proper form
of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint:  we
should thank God for beer and burgandy by not drinking too much 
of them. ... And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind
a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant
to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin.  p. 65

. . . our attitude towards life can be better expressed in
terms of a kind of military loyalty than in terms of criticism
and approval.  My acceptance of the universe is not optimism,
it is more like patriotism. p. 67
 
The same women who are ready to defend their men through thick
and thin are (in their personal intercourse with the man) almost
morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness
of his head.  A man's friend likes him but leaves him as he is:
his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody
else.  Woman who are utter mystics in their creed are utter cynics
in their criticsim.  p. 71

We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be
stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at
evening. p. 72

Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a 
Christian to die to it?  p. 72

Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin.  It is the ultimate 
and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence;
the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life.  The man who kills
a man, kills a man.  The man who kills himself, kills all men; as   
far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.  His act is worse
(symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage.  For
it destroys all buildings:  it insults all women.  The thief is 
satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not:  that is his
crime.  he cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the
Celestial City.  The thief compliments the things he steals,
if not the owner of them.  But the suicide insults everything
on earth by not stealing it.  He defiles every flower by
refusing to live for its sake.  There is not a tiny creature 
in the cosmos  at whom his death is not a sneer.  When a man 
hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger 
and the birds fly away in fury:  for each has received a 
personal affront.  Of course there may be pathetic emotional 
excuses for the act.  There often are for rape, and there 
almost always are for dynamite.  But if it comes to clear 
ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is 
much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at 
the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than 
in Mr. Archer's suicidal automatic machines.  There is a 
meaning in burying the suicide apart.  The man's crime is 
different from other crimes-for it makes even crimes 
impossible.  pp. 72-73

Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, 
but is not credible in the twentieth.  You might as well say 
that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but 
cannot be believed on Tuesdays.  You might as well say of a 
view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, 
but not suitable to half-past four. p. 74

". . . pride without the excuse of passion." p. 76

It is this silent swerving from accuracy by an inch that is 
the uncanny element in everything.  It seems a sort of secret 
treason in the universe.  An apple or an orange is round 
enough to get itself called round, and yet is not round after
all.  The earth itself is shaped like an orange in order to
lure some simple astronomer into calling it a globe.  A blade
of grass is called after the blade of a sword, because it comes
to a point; but it doesn't.  Everywhere in things there is this
element of the quiet and incalculable.  It escapes the rationalists,
but it never escapes till the last moment.  p. 81

For the more complicated seems the coincidence, the less it can
be a coincidence.  p. 82

[The Church] . . . has always had a healthy hatred of pink. p. 97

There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.
It was sanity:  and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.
It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, 
seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every 
attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of
arithmetic.  The Church in its early days went fierce and fast 
with any war horse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she
merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism.  She
swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous
obstacles.  She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, 
buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too
worldly.  The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism,
which would have made it too unworldly.  The orthodox Church
never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the
orthodox Church was never respectable.  It would have been
easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians.  It
would have been easy, in the Calvinist seventeenth century, to fall
into the bottomless pit of predestination.  It is easy to be a 
madman:  it is easy to be a heretic.  It is always easy to let
the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's
own.  It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a
snob.  To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and
exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect
set along the historic path of Christendom-that would indeed have
been simple.  It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of
angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.  To have
fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science 
would indeed have been obvious and tame.  But to have avoided
them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the
heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull
heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeeling
but erect.  p. 101 

[again I offer my disclaimer against his linking Calvinism
with heresy, but it is still a great quotation.] 

Under the impulse of His [Jesus'] spirit arose like a 
clamorous chorus the facades of the mediaeval cathedrals,
thronged with shouting faces and open mouths.  The prophecy has
fulfilled itself:  the very stones cry out.  p. 102

Obviously, it will not do to take our ideal from the
principle in nature; for the simple reason that (except
for some human or divine theory), there is no principle in
nature.  For instance, the cheap anti-democrat of to-day will
tell you solemnly that there is no equality in nature.  He is
right, but he does not see the logical addendum.  There is
no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature.
Inequality, as much as equality, implies a standard of value.  To
read aristocracy into the anarchy of animals is just as
sentimental as to read democracy into it.  Both aristocracy
and democracy are human ideals:  the one saying that all men
are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable.  But
nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; 
nature makes no remark on the subject.  She does not even say
that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable.  We think the
cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular
philosophy to the effect that life is better than death.  But
if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that
the cat had beaten him at all.  He might think he had beaten the
cat by getting to the grave first.  Or he might feel that he 
had actually inflicted frightful punishment on the cat by
keeping him alive.  Just as a microbe might feel proud of
spreading a pestilence so the pessimistic mouse might exult
to think that he was renewing in the cat the torture of
conscious existence.  It all depends on the philosophy of
the mouse.  pp. 102-103

Again, some people try to anticipate nature by doing something,
by doing anything.  Because we may possibly grow wings they cut
off their legs.  Yet nature may be trying to make them 
centipedes for all they know. p. 105

We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to
change it.  We now add that we must be fond of another world
(real or imaginary) in order to have something to change it to.
p. 105

We need not debate about the mere words evolution or progress:
personally I prefer to call it reform.  For reform implies form.
p. 105

. . . ours is only an age of conservation because it is an age
of complete unbelief.  Let beliefs fade fast and frequently, if
you wish institutions to remain the same.  p. 107

Managed in a modern style the emancipation of the slave's mind
is the best way of preventing the emancipation of the slave. 
Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he
will not free himself.  p. 107

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of  
earth will be exactly the same.  No ideal will remain long
enough to be realized, or even partly realized. p. 107

The guillotine has many sins, but to do it justice there is nothing
evolutionary about it.  The favourite evolutionary argument finds
its best answer in the axe.  The Evolutionist says, "Where do you
draw the line?"  the Revolutionist answers, "I draw it _here_:
exactly between your head and body."  p. 109

To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in
the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan.  In the
upper world hell once rebelled against heaven.  But in this 
world heaven is rebelling against hell.  For the orthodox there can
always be a revolution; for a revolution is a restoration.  At any
instant you may strike a blow for the perfection which no man has
seen since Adam. p. 110

I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as meaning
one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of
humanity.  They suggest that through the ages we have been growing
more and more humane, that is to say, that one after another, groups
or sections of beings, slaves, children, women, cows, or what not,
have been gradually admitted to mercy or to justice.  They say
that we once thought it right to eat men (we didn't); but I am
not here concerned with their history, which is highly unhistorical.
As a fact, anthopophagy is certainly a decadent thing, not a 
primative one.  It is much more likely that modern men will eat
human flesh out of affectation than that primative man ever ate it
out of ignorance.  I am here only following the outlines of their
agrument, which consists in maintaining that man has been 
progressively more lenient, first to citizens, then to slaves, then
to animals, and the (presumably) to plants.  I think it wrong to
sit on a man.  Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse.
Eventually (I suppose) I shall think it wrong to sit on a chair.
That is the drive of their argument.  And for this argument it
can be said that it is possible to talk of it in terms of
evolution or inevitable progress.  A perpetual tendency to touch
fewer and fewer things might - one feels, be a mere brute
unconscious tendency, like that of a species to produce fewer and
fewer children.  This drift may be really evolutionary, because it is
stupid.  p. 111

On the evolutionary basis you may be inhumane, or you may be
absurdly humane; but you cannot be human.  That you and a tiger
are one may be a reason for being tender to a tiger.  Or it may
be a reason for being as cruel as the tiger.  It is one way to train
the tiger to imitate you, it is a shorter way to imitate the tiger.
But in neither case does evolution tell you how to treat a tiger
reasonably, that is, to admire his stripes while avoiding his
claws. pp. 111-112

The main point of Christianity was this:  that Nature is not our
mother:  Nature is our sister.  p. 112

To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister:  a
little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved. p. 112

But the question is, do we want to have longer and longer noses?
I fancy not; I believe that we most of us want to say to our noses,
"thus far, and no farther; and here shall thy proud point be
stayed" .... p. 112

We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive
is that things naturally tend to grow better.  But the only real
reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow
worse.  The corruption in things is not only the best argument for
being a progressive; it is also the only argument against being
conservative.  The conservative theory would really be quite
sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact.  But
all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things
alone you leave them as they are.  But you do not.  If you leave
a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. pp. 114-115

We do not need a censorship of the press.  We have a censorship
by the press. p. 116

[T]he danger was not in man's environment, but in man. p. 118

I know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied
in trying to produce an abnormally large needle.  I know that the
most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very
small camel. p. 118

Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern
society to rags.  p. 118

In the best Utopia, I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man 
in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my 
position at this moment. p. 119

Christianity . . . [and] democracy . . . have often quarrelled.
p. 119

[W]e have not got to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule.
Rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he
can't. p. 119

The great and very obvious merit of the English aristocracy is that
nobody could possibly take it seriously. p. 122

The man of the nineteenth century did not disbelieve in the Resurrection
because his liberal Christianity allowed him to doubt it.  He 
disbelieved in it because his very strict materialism did not allow
him to believe it.  p. 127

The doubts of the agnostic were only the dogmas of the monist. p. 127

It is rather like alluding to the obvious connection between the
two ceremonies fo the sword:  when it taps a man's shoulder,
and when it cuts off his head.  It is not at all similar for the
man.  p.130

Certainly the most sagacious creeds may suggest that we should
pursue God into deeper and deeper rings of the labyrinth of
our own ego.  But only we of Christendom have said that we 
should hunt God like an eagle upon the mountains:  and we
have killed all monsters in the chase.  p. 134

The god who is a mere awful unity is not only a king but an
Eastern king. p. 135

[E]ven asceticism became brotherly; and the Trappists were
sociable even when they were silent. p. 135  

For to us Trinitarians (if I may say it with reverence) - to
us God Himself is a society. p. 135

In a garden Satan tempted man:  and in a garden God tempted 
God.  p. 138

I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he
will have no personal existence after death that he falls
back on the position that he has no personal existence now.
p. 139

That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher
than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them;
does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble
or carve mutton.  People talk of barbaric architecture and
debased art.  But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory
even in a rococo style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, 
though equipped with the material of many camel's-hair brushes.
p. 144

We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal.  It
is man that has broken out.  All other animals are tame animals;
folowing the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.  p. 144

And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging
to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was
not dark.  It was a shining bridge connecting two shining 
civilizations.  p. 147

This, therefore, is, in conclusion, my reason for accepting the
religion and not merely the scattered and secular truths out of the
relition.  I do it because the thing has not merely told this truth
or that truth, but has revealed itself as a truth-telling thing.
pp. 156-157

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the 
gigantic secret of the Christian.  And as I close this chaotic
volume I open again the strange small book from which all 
Christianity came; and I am again haunted by a kind of confirmation.
The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels towers in this 
respect, as in every other, above all the thinkers who ever 
thought themselves tall.  His pathos was natural, almost casual.  
The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing their 
tears.  He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly on 
His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His 
native city.  Yet He concealed something.  Solemn supermen
and imperial diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger.
He never restrained His anger.  He flung furniture down the 
front steps of the Temple, and asked men how they expected to 
escape the damnation of hell.  Yet He restrained something.  I 
say it with reverence; there was in that shattering personality a 
thread that must be called shyness.  There was something that He 
hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray.  There was 
something that He covered constantly by abrupt silence or impetuous 
isolation.  There was some one thing that was too great for God to 
show us when He walked upon our earth; and I sometimes fancied that 
it was His mirth. p. 160


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