A DECENT EDUCATION

'...for a boy is only sent to be taught at school when it is too late to teach him anything. The real thing has been done already, and thank God it's nearly always done by women.' 

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.115. 

THE COMMUNITY AT THE HEART OF THE UNIVERSE

'The heart of humanity, especially of European humanity, is certainly much more satisfied by the strange hints and symbols that gather round the Trinitarian idea, the image of a council at which mercy pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty and variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world. For Western religion has always felt keenly the idea "it is not good for man to be alone.'"

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.99. 

CREATION

'A child kicks his legs rythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"...Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes ever daisy separately, but that he has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repitition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.'

GK Chesterton in Tim Chester, You Can Change, p.97.

OTHER RELIGIONS

'Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Anyone who knows anybody knows how it would work;...that Jones shall worship the god within turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner-Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within.'

GK Chesterton in C FitzSimmons Allison, The Cruelty of Heresy, p.167.  

CHURCH

'The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.

GK Chesterton in Matthew Lee Anderson, Earthen Vessels, p.221.

GOVERNMENT

'" ...you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question. You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists: they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have laways objected to being governed at all."'

GK Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, p.141.

MARRIAGE

'...there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.'

GK Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, p.94.

PHILOSOPHERS

'"...We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous crininals. We remember the great poisoning princes of the  Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential idea of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish that the property to become their property that they might more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property, they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Muderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's."'

GK Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, p.44.

SEXUAL TEMPTATION

'Every man who knocks on the door of the brothel is looking for God.'

GK Chesterton in Tim Chester, Captured by a Better Vision, p.50.

GIVING THANKS

'You say grace before meals.
All right.
But I say grace before the play and the opera,
And grace before the concert and pantomime,
And grace before I open a book,
And grace before sketching, painting,
Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
And grace before I dip the pen into the ink.'
GK Chesterton in Julian Hardyman, Idols, p.37.

CHRISTIANITY

'All the real argument about religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when he comes right way up. The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality. That is the inmost philosophy of the Fall.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.117.

MIRACLES

'Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.111.

EDUCATION

'I have known people who protested against religious education with arguments against any education, saying that the child's mind must grow freely or that the old must not teach the young.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.103.

WORDS

'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 recognised 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 grey 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.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.91.

GOVERNMENT

'If our faith comments on government at all, its comment must be this - that the man should rule who does not think that he can rule... we must take the crown in our hands, and go hunting in dry places and dark corners of the earth until we find the one man who feels himself unable to wear it... we 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.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.87.

HUMANKIND

'...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.'

GK Cheserton, Orthodoxy, p.87.

NATURE

'The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.82.

SUFFERING

'There is a vital objection to the advice merely to grin and bear it. The objection is that if you merely bear it, you do not grin.'

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.74.

DOCTRINE

‘...if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness.’
GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.73.

CHRISTIANITY

‘And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.’
GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p.69,