G.K. Chesterton Quotes - Page 6

Buddhism seeks after God with the largest conception it can find, the all-producing and all-absorbing One; Christianity seeks after God with the most elementary passion it can find - the craving for a father, the hunger that is as old as the hills. It turns the whole cry of a lost universe into the cry of a lost child.

Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.

In the modern world, we are primarily confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of people turning to new ideals because they have not tried the old. Men have not gotten tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it.

I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.

The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.

The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.

Fairy tales make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

We do wrong to seek peace in Nature; we should rather seek the nobler sort of war; and see all the trees as green banners.

We are in this fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world.

There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War - they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.

The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.

I am sure that it was only because Michael Angelo was engaged in the ancient and honourable occupation of lying in bed that he ever realised how the roof of the Sistine Chapel might be made into an awful imitation of a divine drama that could only be acted in the heavens.

This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.

Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.