Chestertonian Thought of the Day

"Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections."
-- Illustrated London News, June 6, 1931

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die."
-- "Orthodoxy"

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

"There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there."
-- Introduction, "The Everlasting Man"

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

"There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don't know it."
-- "The Mercy of Mr. Arnold Bennett" Fancies vs. Fads

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

"There are two kinds of peacemakers in the modern world; and they are both, though in various ways, a nuisance. The first peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that he agrees with everybody. He confuses everybody. The second peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that everybody agrees with him. He enrages everybody. Between the two of them they produce a hundred times more disputes and distractions than we poor pugnacious people would ever have thought of in our lives."
-- Illustrated London News 3-3-06

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

"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."
-- "Babies and Distributism" The Well and the Shallows

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

"The position we have now reached is this: starting from the State, we try to remedy the failures of all the families, all the nurseries, all the schools, all the workshops, all the secondary institutions that once had some authority of their own. Everything is ultimately brought into the Law Courts. We are trying to stop the leak at the other end."
-- Illustrated London News, 3/24/23

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

[Re: Cloning:]

"We are learning to do a great many clever things . . . The next great task will be to learn not to do them.
-- "Queen Victoria" Varied Types

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

"The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs."
-- Chapter 16, "Heretics," 1905

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
-- Illustrated London News, 5/5/28

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

"Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before."
-- "Tremendous Trifles"

Chestertonian Thought for the Day

"All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive."
-- "The Thing" CW. III 191

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

"The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice."
- Illustrated London News, 6/11/10

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man."
-- "Introduction to the Book of Job," 1907

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

[EDITOR'S NOTE: This is a special long one for Good Friday that I poached from a 2008 post on the American Chesterton Society blog. Thanks to them for making note of these passages from "Orthodoxy."]

That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete.

Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point - and does not break.

In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt.

It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." [Mt 4:7 quoting Dt. 6:16] No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism.

When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. [Mt 27:46 quoting Ps 22:1] And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt.

Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist. [cf The Everlasting Man CW2:344]

-- "Orthdoxy"

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

"These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own."
-- Illustrated London News, 8-11-28

Chestertonian Thought for the Day

"One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created."
-- "The Boston Sunday Post," 1/16/21

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

"The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis."
-- "David Copperfield," Chesterton on Dickens, 1911

Chestertonian Thought of the Day

"You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
-- "Tremendous Trifles," 1909

Chestertonian Thought for the Day

"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God."
-- "Christendom in Dublin," 1933