Written by awneitsch on April 25, 2022

G.K. Chesterton Quoted

Social Studies

I’ve heard his name in the past and a few quotes here and there but never really looked into the man and his works. He is one one those minds that seems to have nailed the human condition to the point where, upon reflection, could be seen as visionary. He lived and worked in a time when opinions were discussed with vigour, intelligence, humour, and in open debate. We now live in a world where all of these aspects of human discourse have been reduced to digital virtue signalling, grievous offence, cancel culture, and silence.

The Back of the World

By Adam Gopnik

June 30, 2008

From The New Yorker – When They Were Allowed To Publish Balanced Views

This year is the hundredth anniversary of G. K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday,” and it has come out in at least two new editions on the occasion. “The Man Who Was Thursday” is one of the hidden hinges of twentieth-century writing, the place where, before our eyes, the nonsense-fantastical tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear pivots and becomes the nightmare-fantastical tradition of Kafka and Borges. It is also, along with Chesterton’s “The Napoleon of Notting Hill,” the nearest thing that this masterly writer wrote to a masterpiece.

Chesterton is an easy writer to love—a brilliant sentence-maker, a humorist, a journalist of endless appetite and invention. His aphorisms alone are worth the price of admission, better than any but Wilde’s. Even his standard-issue zingers are first-class—“Americans are the people who describe their use of alcohol and tobacco as vices”; “There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape-nuts on principle”; “ ‘My country, right or wrong,’ is a thing that no true patriot would think of saying. . . . It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober’ ”—while the deeper ones are genuine Catholic koans, pregnant and profound: “Blasphemy depends on belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.” Or: “The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.” Or: “A key has no logic to its shape. Its logic is: it turns the lock.”

But he is a difficult writer to defend. Those of us who are used to pressing his writing on friends have the hard job of protecting him from his detractors, who think he was a nasty anti-Semite and medievalizing reactionary, and the still harder one of protecting him from his admirers, who pretend that he was not. His Catholic devotees are legion and fanatic—the small Ignatius Press has taken on the heroic job of publishing everything he wrote in a uniform edition, and is already up to the thirty-fifth volume—but not always helpful to his non-cult reputation, especially when they insist on treating his gassy Church apologetics as though they were as interesting as his funny and suggestively mystical Christian allegories. He has a loving following among liberal Catholics, like Garry Wills and Wilfrid Sheed, and even nonbelievers, like Martin Gardner. But his most strenuous advocates are mainly conservative preVatican II types who are indignant about his neglect without stopping to reflect how much their own uncritical enthusiasm may have contributed to it.

Chesterton is one of that company of writers whom we call Edwardian (though they stretch back to the last years of Victoria), a golden generation that emerged in the eighteen-nineties with personas seeming as fully formed as the silent comedians of the Mack Sennett studio, complete with style, costume, and gesture. Writing in London at a time when hundreds of morning newspapers and as many magazines competed for copy, and where mass literacy had created a mass audience without yet entirely removing respect for intellect, they made themselves as much as they made their sentences. We see them as we read them: Shaw all crinkled, beaming rationality, Kipling beetle-browed, bespectacled imperial intensity.

Chesterton embodied the hearty side of mysticism, cape thrown across his shoulders, broad-brimmed hat on his head and sword-stick at his side, a hungry Catholic Pantagruel in London. (The last generation of writers who had anything like the same signature presence were the Americans who first encountered television, in the fifties—Mailer and Capote and Vidal—and for the same reason: they lent prestige to a new mass medium that hadn’t yet learned how easily it could get along without them.)

Chesterton thinks the anarchist’s hatred of bourgeois materialism is so obviously attractive, comes so near to the divine, that it is the truest evil. Only an act of strong will can resist it. Where the ordinary liberal scoffs at the idea that apocalyptic terror represents a real threat to his society, the awakened humanist, like Syme the poet-policeman or Chesterton himself, believes that everyone else has missed the reality, by refusing to accept how plausible and alluring the argument for destruction is. To anyone “awakened” in this way, people who hold the alternative normal view—that there is nothing much to be frightened of—are literally insane. They cannot see what is in front of their noses even as it blows up their cities. The nightmarish intensity of “The Man Who Was Thursday” derives from this conviction. Only cops and criminals are really alive.

Yet Chesterton still had his wits about him, and recognizes, at the end of his book, that the demon-terrorists are largely a projection of the policeman’s mind. Or is it, perhaps, that the anarchists, who are really policemen, secretly wish to be anarchists? This double vision, where the appetite for romantic violence is imagined as the flip side of the desire for absolute order, gives the book its permanence. It ends with a powerful and strange image of reality itself as two-sided:

“Listen to me,” cried Syme with extraordinary emphasis. “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stopping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—”

Quoted Thusly :

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
– Illustrated London News, April 19, 1930

“Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.”
– The Speaker, Dec. 15, 1900

“An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.”
– “On Running After Ones Hat,” All Things Considered

“What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.”
– “On Bright Old Things and Other Things,” Sidelights on New London and Newer New York

“He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”
– “The Travellers in State,” Tremendous Trifles

“Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.”
– “The Miser and His Friends,” A Miscellany of Men

“Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.”
– “The Six Philosophers,”The Man Who was Thursday

“The simplification of anything is always sensational.”
– “Tolstoy and the Cult of Simplicity,” Varied Types

“Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.”
– Illustrated London News, Jan. 11, 1908

“I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.”
– Illustrated London News, June 3, 1922

“The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.”
– “Sir Walter Scott,” Twelve Types

“The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.”
– Introduction to The Defendant

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”
– “The War of the Usurpers,” A Short History of England

“All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.”
– “On Gargoyles,” Alarms and Discursions

“The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.”
– Illustrated London News, Feb. 10, 1906

“We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.”
– Illustrated London News, Jan. 17, 1931

“When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven’t got any.”
– Illustrated London News, Nov. 7, 1908

“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.”
– Broadcast talk, June 11, 1935

“Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told.”
– “The Love of Lead,” Lunacy and Letters

“The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce.”
– Illustrated London News,  Dec. 25, 1909

“The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.” – Illustrated London News, Oct. 28, 1922

“Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of ‘touching’ a man’s heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.” – “Charles II,” Twelve Types

“Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness – or so good as drink.”
– “Wine When it is Red,” All Things Considered

“When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.”
– “On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family,” Heretics

“A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.”
– “The Moral Philosophy of Meredith,” A Handful of Authors“A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.” Click To Tweet

“A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run. In short, it is the setting up of the mood against the mind.”
– William Blake

“The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.”
– Roman Converts, Dublin Review, Jan-Mar. 1925

“I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much.”
– Illustrated London News, May 24, 1930

On Virtue

“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”

-Good Reads – Quotable Quotes

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