In the 15th century men cross-examined and tormented a man because he preached some immoral attitude; in the 19th century we feted and flattered Oscar Wilde because he preached such an attitude, and then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out.
It is the most sincere compliment to an author to misquote him. It means that his work has become a part of our mind and not merely of our library.
Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision; instead we are always changing the vision.
[The form GKC filled in to get an American visa] was a little like a freer form of the game called ‘Confessions’ which my friends and I invented in our youth; an examination paper containing questions like ‘If you saw a rhinoceros in the front garden, what would you do?’ One of my friends, I remember, wrote: ‘Take the pledge’.
The past is not what it was.
I do feel a certain contempt for those who charge a man with talking for effect, as if there were anything else to talk for.
If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
Surrey is the debatable land between London and England. It is not a county but a border; it is there that South London meets and makes war on Sussex.
A real mob is sadly rare in modern politics.
The literary world is kept in a perpetual brawl about the brothers Sitwell and their distinguished sister. But if we ask what the row is all about, we find it is about poems which describe, especially at their best, the quaint quietude of Early Victorian rooms and gardens and the depths of long childish days.
Gibbon is now a classic; that is, he is quoted instead of being read.
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
If a man has flung away bad ideas he has shown sense, but if he has flung away good ideas he has shown his genius.
The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
The tall building is itself artistically akin to the tall story. The very word skyscraper is an admirable example of an American lie.
His beard had turned grey; the last to his regret, as he had wanted it to remain red till they had completed colour photography. [Of George Bernard Shaw]
It is all the more curious that the technique of such tales [detective fiction] is not discussed, because they are exactly the sort in which technique is nearly the whole of the trick. It is all the more odd that such writers have no critical guidance, because it is one of the few forms of art in which they could to some extent be guided. And it is all the more strange that nobody discusses the rules, because it is one of the rare cases in which some rules could be laid down. Nobody writes the simple book I expect every day to see on the bookstalls, called How to Write a Detective Story.
God moves in a mysterious way; and considering that most people would expect Catholic literature to be rather romantic, it will be very amusing if the new Catholic literature turns out to be strictly realistic, and beats the realists at their own game.
When I first heard of the scheme for carving colossal heads of American heroes out of the everlasting hills, the scheme (I think) of the American sculptor Mr Borglum, I felt again the thrill first given to me in childhood in reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fantasy of ‘The Great Stone Face’. The whole conception really requires the vast American background of prairies and mountain chains. Anyone would feel, I think, that it would be rather too big for England. It would be rather alarming for the Englishman, returning by boat to Dover, to see that Shakespeare’s Cliff had suddenly turned into Shakespeare.
Of all the things a child sees and touches, the most dangerous toy is about the least dangerous thing. There is hardly a single domestic utensil that is not much more dangerous than a little bow and arrows. He can burn himself in the fire, he can boil himself in the bath, he can cut his throat with the carving-knife, he can scald himself with the kettle, he can choke himself with anything small enough, he can break his neck off anything high enough. He plays all day in a house fitted up with engines of torture like the Spanish Inquisition. And while he thus dances in the shadow of death, he is to be saved from all the perils of possessing a piece of string, tied to a bent bow or twig. [On hearing that fewer toy bows and arrows were being made because they were considered dangerous].
The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.
If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
AM IN MARKET HARBOROUGH WHERE OUGHT I TO BE GILBERT [Telegram from GKC to his wife, Frances]
She often took the step from the sublime to the ridiculous; but to take this step one must reach the sublime. [Of Elizabeth Barrett Browning]
Blasphemy depends upon belief, and is fading with it. If anyone doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.
From The Wit and Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton, edited by Bevis Hillier, Continuum, £14.99, pp. 256, ISBN 9781441179586
(published 28 October)
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