Selected Quotes from G.K. Chesterton -- 1926 to 1928
Note: for the most part the following quotes are from GKC's
column for the Illustrated London News. (He wrote the column
from 1905 until his death in 1936.) Dates, either in years
or more specific, would refer to when the column was published.
There are also two books with collections of quotes from GKC.
"The Quotable Chesterton" was edited by George J. Marlin, Richard
P. Rabatin, and John L. Swan and published by Ignatius Press.
It's mostly quotes from Chesterton's books, such as the Father Brown
series. It included a bibliography of Chesterton's writings.
"More Quotable Chesterton", was edited by the same men, and also
published by Ignatius. It consists of quotes culled from the
Illustrated London News columns.
The following quotes are my own selections from the ILN columns.
When such a critic says, for instance, that faith kept the world in
darkness until doubt led to enlightenment, he is himself taking things
on faith, things that he has never been sufficiently enlightened to
doubt. That exceedingly crude simplification of human history is what
he has been taught, and he believes it because he has been taught. I do
not blame him for that; I merely remark that he is an unconscious
example of everything that he reviles. 2/13/1926
I am very glad that our fashionable fiction seems to be full of a
return to paganism, for it may possibly be the first step of a return
to Christianity. Neo-pagans have sometimes forgotten, when they set out
to do everything the old pagans did, that the final thing the old
pagans did was to get christened. 3/20/1926
The one really rousing thing about human history is that, whether or no
the proceedings go right, at any rate, the prophecies always go wrong.
The promises are never fulfilled and the threats are never fulfilled.
Even when good things do happen, they are never the good things that
were guaranteed. And even when bad things happen, they are never the
bad things that were inevitable. You may be quite certain that, if an
old pessimist says the country is going to the dogs, it will go to any
other animals except the dogs; if it be to the dromedaries or even the
dragons. ... It was as if one weather prophet confidently predicted
blazing sunshine and the other was equally certain of blinding fog; and
they were both buried in a beautiful snow-storm and lay, fortunately
dead, under a clear and starry sky. 4/17/26
Poets and such persons talk about the public as if it were some
enormous and abnormal monster-a huge hybrid between the cow they milk
and the dragon that drinks their blood. 7/31/26
Grimm's Fairy Tales were by far the greatest things that ever came out
of Germany; and it may yet prove that Joel Chandler Harris's collection
of negro fairy-tales is the greatest thing that ever came out of
America. 11/13/26
All centralized systems mean the rule of the few; and industrial
machinery is the most centralized of all systems. If the modern
American really wants to know what his fathers meant by democracy, he
will never learn it from a Ford car. He must make the supreme and awful
sacrifice. He must get out and walk. 11/13/26
[...] to realize that Sherlock Holmes is not really a real logician. He
is an ideal logician imagined by an illogical person. [...] But
Sherlock Holmes is an ideal figure, and in an imaginative sense a very
effective one. He does embody the notion which unreasonable people
entertain of what pure reason would be like. 1/5/27
I think the name of leisure has come to cover three totally different
things. The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being
allowed to do anything. And the third (and perhaps most rare and
precious) is being allowed to do nothing. Of the first we have
undoubtedly a vast and a very probably a most profitable increase in
recent social arrangements. Undoubtedly there is much more elaborate
equipment and opportunity for golfers to play golf, for bridge-players
to play bridge, for jazzers to jazz, or for motorists to motor. But
those who find themselves in the world where these recreations are
provided will find that the modern world is not really a universal
provider. He will find it made more and more easy to get some things
and impossible to get others. [] The second sort of leisure is
certainly not increased, and is on the whole lessened. The sense of
having a certain material in hand which a man may mould into _any_ form
he chooses, this a sort of pleasure now almost confined to artists. As
for the third form of leisure, the most precious, the most consoling,
the most pure and holy, the noble habit of doing nothing at all--that
is being neglected in a degree which seems to me to threaten the
degeneration of the whole race. It is because artists do not practice,
patrons do not patronise, crowds do not assemble to worship reverently
the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy
and even failed to create a new religion. 7/23/1927
From time to time, as we all know, a sect appears in our midst
announcing that the world will very soon come to an end. Generally, by
some slight confusion or miscalculation, it is the sect that comes to
an end. Such is our heartless and heathen frivolity that most of us
even prefer this issue to the alternative. 9/24/1927
[...] it is a queer paradox that Shakespeare was an obscure and almost
unhistorical figure; according to some nameless or worthless, according
to others impersonal and self-effacing, but anyhow somewhat elusive and
secret; and from him came a cataract of clear song and national
eloquence; while Bacon was a public man of wide renown and national and
scientific philosophy; and out of him have come riddles and oracles and
fantastic cryptograms and a lifelong hobby for lunatics. 10/1/1927
If there is no design existing beforehand, and no goal existing
already, how are we to know whether any entirely new thing is a good
thing or not? All attempted answers to this question are evasions of
the question. We may say that man must judge by his best moral
standards; but that is to admit that there are standards by which we
can judge the standards. We may say that he must follow where the best
light leads him; but that is to admit that there is a difference
between light and darkness which cannot change. And why should it not
change if everything else changes. 10/15/1927
What we call personality (...) has become the most impersonal thing in
the world. Its pale and featureless face appears like a ghost at every
corner and in every crowd. ... Individualism kills individuality,
precisely because individualism has to be an 'ism' quite as much as
Communism or Calvinism. The economic and ethical school which calls
itself individualist ended by threatening the world with the flattest
and dullest spread of the commonplace. Men, instead of being
themselves, set out to find a self to be: a sort of abstract economic
self identified with self-interest. But while the self was that of a
man, the self-interest was generally that of a class or a trade or even
an empire. So far from really remaining a separate self, the man became
part of a communal mass of selfishness. 2/25/1928
[...] we have a suffocating sense of luxury and no sense at all of
liberty. All the pleasure-hunters seem to be themselves hunted. All the
children of fortune seem to be chained to the wheel. There is very
little that really even pretends to be happiness in all this sort of
harassed hedonism. 4/28/1928
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