Mothers

“It is not difficult to see why … the female became the emblem of the universal … Nature …. surrounded her with very young children, who require being taught not so much anything as everything. Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world. To put the matter shortly, woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone says that this duty of general enlightenment … is in itself too exacting and oppressive, I can understand the view. I can only answer that our race has thought it worth while to cast this burden on women in order to keep common-sense in the world. … How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No. A woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.”

G. K. Chesterton

Generousity

“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.”

G. K. Chesterton – A Miscellany of Men

Adventure and Inconvenience

“An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.”

G. K. Chesterton – On Running After Ones Hat, All Things Considered, 1908

Tragedy, Comedy and Sanity

“He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”

G. K. Chesterton – Tremendous Trifles, 1909

Temper and Truth

There is a thing called temper. It does colour one’s common life; the sky and landscape alter it; also it alters the sky and landscape. But temper is not the key of the universe; temper is not truth. A good-tempered man is not a saint; nor is a bad-tempered man necessarily a sinner. We all see truth as a light through very various windows; the question is, which of us wish to pull down the blinds?

G. K. Chesterton – Illustrated London News, Dec. 17, 1910

Atheistic Style

“The mark of the atheistic style is that it instinctively chooses the word which suggests that things are dead things; that things have no souls. Thus they will not speak of waging war, which means willing it; they speak of the “outbreak of war,” as if all the guns blew up without the men touching them. Instead of saying that employers pay less wages, which might pin the employers to some moral responsibility, they insist on talking about the “rise and fall” of wages. They will not speak of reform, but of development. The atheist style in letters always avoids talking of love or lust, which are things alive, and calls marriage or concubinage “the relations of the sexes”; as if a man and a woman were two wooden objects standing in a certain angle and attitude to each other, like a table and a chair.”

G. K. Chesterton – “The Flying Authority” Eugenics and Other Evils

Living Things

“Living things must constantly be broken up and destroyed; it is only the dead things than can be left alone.”

G. K. Chesterton – “The Riddle of the Restoration” Lunacy and Letters

Joy of Spring

“My love is like a red, red rose” does not mean that the poet is praising roses under the allegory of a young lady. “My love is an arbutus” does not mean that the author was a botanist so pleased with a particular arbutus tree that he said he loved it. “Who art the moon and regent of my sky” does not mean that Juliet invented Romeo to account for the roundness of the moon. “Christ is the Sun of Easter” does not mean that the worshiper is praising the sun under the emblem of Christ. Goddess or god can clothe themselves with the spring or summer; but the body is more than raiment. Religion takes almost disdainfully the dress of Nature; and indeed Christianity has done as well with the snows of Christmas as with the snow-drops of spring. And when I look across the sun-struck fields, I know in my inmost bones that my joy is not solely in the spring, for spring alone, being always returning, would be always sad. There is somebody or something walking there, to be crowned with flowers: and my pleasure is in some promise yet possible and in the resurrection of the dead.”

G. K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men

as Flames in Winter

“I say you cannot really understand any myths till you have found that one of them is not a myth. Turnip ghosts mean nothing if there are no real ghosts. Forged bank-notes mean nothing if there are no real bank-notes. Heathen gods mean nothing, and must always mean nothing, to those of us that deny the Christian God. When once a god is admitted, even a false god, the Cosmos begins to know its place: which is the second place. When once it is the real God the Cosmos falls down before Him, offering flowers in spring as flames in winter.”

G. K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men

Adventure of Virtue

“Keep before your eyes the supreme adventure of virtue. If you are brave, think of the man who was braver than you. If you are kind, think of the man who was kinder than you. That is what was meant by having a patron saint.”

G. K. Chesterton (“The War on Holidays,” Utopia of Usurers)