Quote

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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Gilbert K. Chesterton
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: May 29
Died: 1936
Died: June 14
Autobiographer
Biographer
Crime Writer
Essayist
Historian
Illustrator
Journalist
Literary Historian
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
Remember
Call
Practicality
Mean
Forget
Rationality
Really
Common
Ecstasy
Life
Means
Instant
Sense
Awful
Spirit
Forgotten
Art
Dead
Certain
Levels
Positivism

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The diseased pride [of artistic individualists] was not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe.
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The trouble with Christianity is, not that its failed, but that it's never been tried . . . not that it can't remake the world, but that it's difficult.
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Original sin is the only doctrine that's been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history.
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The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century.
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Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem.
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Leisure is being allowed to do nothing.
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The true object of human life is play.
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Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.
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Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.
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All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national.
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The people has no definite disbelief in the temples of theology. The people has a very fiery and practical disbelief in the temples of physical science.
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It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.
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Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church.
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There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.
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Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.
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I would never commit the positively anti-social action of robbing a bank, or worse still, working in one.
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I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.
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Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
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Our digestions, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry.
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All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.
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