The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.
To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
Love is not blind that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound and the more it is bound the less it is blind.
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
There is the great lesson of ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ that a thing must be loved before it is lovable.
It [feminism] is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
Humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.
But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.
Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.
…the fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain.
Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.
I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.
We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man’s terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.
For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.
There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism — self-denial.
I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller
There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory … we are all kings in exile.
Unhappy! of course you’ll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn’t be unhappy, like the mother that bore you?
Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.
Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less
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.
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head.
…”vers libre,” (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture.
Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.
It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.
As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.
In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities…it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
[A] finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.
Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.
Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.
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.
A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.
I always like a dog so long as he isn’t spelled backward.
The Reformer is always right about what’s wrong. However, he’s often wrong about what is right.
Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, “I will not hit you if you do not hit me”; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, “We must not hit each other in the holy place.
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
No man who worships education has got the best out of education… Without a gentle contempt for education no man’s education is complete.
That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.
As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.
Obciously, it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people; the assured and experienced truths that are put first to the baby. But in a school today the baby has to submit to a system that is younger than himself.
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.
All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing – and he won’t be missed either.
Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.
The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book, and a tired man who wants a book to read.
There are books showing men how to succeed in everything they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.
A man reading the Dickens novel wished that it might never end. Men read a Dickens story six times because they knew it so well.
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.
No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.
The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side.
…the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.
The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.
Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.
it will be generally found that the popular joke is not true to the letter, but is true to the spirit. The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.
The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.
Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government.
Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments.
It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers.
But it is clear that no political activity can be encouraged by saying that progress is natural and inevitable; that is not a reason for being active, but rather a reason for being lazy.
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”.
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.
A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.
What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves?
Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hears men’s real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?
The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
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.
An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.
Modern intelligence won’t accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.
Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
We may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting.
To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.
And pray where in earth or heaven are there prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides.
The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason.
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.
To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
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.
I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.
A child has an ingrained fancy for coal, not for the gross materialistic reason that it builds up fires by which we cook and are warmed, but for the infinitely nobler and more abstract reason that it blacks his fingers.
The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons, but children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.
Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.
The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.
Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.
Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it and it will endure a thousand years.
But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.
The huge modern heresy is to alter the human soul to fit modern social conditions, instead of altering modern social conditions to fit the human soul.
Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.
of being strong and brave. The strong can not be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.
This cult of the future is not only a weakness but a cowardice of the age.
One definition occurred to both of them—that he had come out into the light of that lucid and radiant ignorance in which all beliefs had begun. The sky above them was full of mythology. Heaven seemed deep enough to hold all the gods.
I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.
Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.
In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.
Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.
The dreadful joy Thy Son has sentIs heavier than any care;We find, as Cain his punishment,Our pardon more than we can bear.
Man is more himself, more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing and grief superficial.
The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.
There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.
I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.
You are my only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you.
Our political vagueness divides men, it does not fuse them.
The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.
How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.
Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained.
Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.
The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
I will go forth as a real outlaw,” he said, “and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway; and it will be counted a wilder crime.
Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion.
That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face – that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.
If we are calm,” replied the policeman, “it is the calm of organized resistance.””Eh?” said Syme, staring.”The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle,” pursued the policeman. “The composure of an army is the anger of a nation.
Are you a devil?””I am a man,” answered Father Brown gravely; “and therefore have all devils in my heart.
A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.
A man must love a thing very much if he practices it without any hope of fame or money, but even practice it without any hope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it.
The real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
I strongly object to wrong arguments on the right side. I think I object to them more than to the wrong arguments on the wrong side.
When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.
There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.
How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.
Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest has failed.
Job is an optimist. He shakes the pillars of the world and strikes insanely at the heavens; he lashes the stars, but it is not to silence them; it is to make them speak.
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.
There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.
He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.
For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.
Men of science offer us health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium.
And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.
Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. ‘Odd, isn’t it,’ he said, ‘that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?
St Thomas (Aqinas) loved books and lived on books… When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, ‘I have understood every page I ever read’.
For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic pride, secondly tears, and third laughter.
The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood without a god.
We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.
When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.
The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world.
I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.
When Nietszche says, “A new commandment I give to you,be hard” he is really saying, “A new commandment I give to you, be dead.” Sensibility is the definition oflife.
It was his home now. But it could not be his home till he had gone from it and returned to it. Now he was the Prodigal Son.
Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door.
Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.
What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.
I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.
An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong.
The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship, even natural to worship unnatural things
We are perishing for lack of wonder, not for lack of wonders.
To train a citizen is to train a critic. The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions.
A head can be beaten small enough until it fits the hat.
Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism.
There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.
She had never really listened to anyone in her life; which, some said, was why she had survived.
Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told.
Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.
Man does not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much the same thing, because he is exhausted
We want the will of the people, not the votes of the people; and to give a man a vote against his will is to make voting more important than the democracy it declares.
The word “good” has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
[T]he most comic things of all are exactly the things most worth doing–such as making love.
The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.
I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking.
A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.
Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are.
It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.
At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder.
A puddle repeats infinity, and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.
All habits are bad habits. (…) Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
No,’ said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity; ‘I do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects would make a man merry.’ ‘Well,’ said Michael quietly, ‘will you tell me one thing? Which of us has ever tried it?
The author challenges how much sanctity has to do with sameness, as he says saints are as different from each other as those in any group — even murderers.
You say grace before meals. I say grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.
Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.
Perhaps we are both doing what we think right. But what we think right is so damned different that there can be nothing between us in the way of concession. There is nothing possible between us but honor and death.
There is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity. You may see it in many modern religions
We men and women are all in the same boat, upon a stormy sea. We owe to each other a terrible and tragic loyalty.
Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the [lunatic] is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles.
It is now certain that the public does know. It is not so certain that the public does care.
That God should allow good people to be as bestially stupid as that–rose against me like a towering blasphemy.
…this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.
[The materialist] thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think [the materialist] a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies.
Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If our civilization goes on like this, only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest.
The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe!
My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.
There is nothing which is so weak for working purposes as the enormous importance attached to immediate victory.
I beseech you, little brothers, that you be as wise as brother Daisy and brother dandelion; for never do they lie awake thinking of tomorrow, yet they have gold crowns like kings and emperors or like Charlemagne in all his glory.
There’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing.
If you consulted your business experiences instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.
I am not good at deception,’ said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.Right, my boy, right,’ said the President with a ponderous heartiness, ‘You aren’t good at anything.
When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : “What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read
no life of faith can be lived privately. There must be an overflow into the lives of others.
He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.
Oh, most unhappy man,’ he cried, ‘try to be happy! You have red hair like your sister.’My red hair, like red flames, shall burn up the world,’ said Gregory.
Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.
I suppose you can guess the whole story now? After all, it’s a primitive story. A man had two enemies. He was a wise man. And so he discovered that two enemies are better than one.
The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity.
Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers.
Journalism largely consists in saying “Lord Jones is dead” to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.
We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.