G. K. Chesterton Quotes

Bob Blaisdell

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780486804385
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

`There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person,` declared the philosopher and wit G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936). The extent and variety of the author's writings ― comprising journalism, history, biography, apologetics, poetry, plays, and detective fiction ― attest to his own diversity of enthusiasms. This rich and thought-provoking anthology draws from Chesterton's vast treasury of publications to present his most trenchant observations on education, humor, literature, religion, politics, class, and other topics.
Editor Bob Blaisdell offers an insightful introduction to Chesterton's life and works and identifies the source of each quotation. Organized thematically, the quotes range from quips from Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries (`The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.`) and novels (`Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.`) to his newspaper columns (`An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.`) and essays (`No man must be superior to the things that are common to men.… Not only are we all in the same boat, but we are all seasick.`).
`If you're a fan of Chesterton's writing than this quote collection will be great for you. Blaisdell's introduction is also very interesting. The kind of book that would do great on a coffee table, ready to be picked up and browsed through at random times.` — A Universe in Words

Literature

… to dive into any very ancient human work is to dive into a bottomless sea, and the man who seeks old things will be always finding new things. Centuries hence the world will be still seeking for the secret of Job, which is, indeed, in a sense the secret of everything.

—“Leviathan and the Hook,” The Speaker, September 9, 1905

The greatness of Homer consists in the fact that he could make men feel, what they were already quite ready to think, that life is a strange mystery in which a hero may err and another hero may fall. The poet makes men realize how great are the great emotions which they, in a smaller way, have already experienced.

—Chaucer (1932)

It is surely obvious that there is nothing so fragile as a fact, that a fact flies away quicker than a fancy. A fancy will endure for two thousand years. For instance, we all have fancy for an entirely fearless man, a hero: and the Achilles of Homer still remains. But exactly the thing we do not know about Achilles is how far he was possible. The realistic narrators of the time are all forgotten (thank God); so we cannot tell whether Homer slightly exaggerated or wildly exaggerated or did not exaggerate at all, the personal activity of a Mycenaean captain in battle: for the fancy has survived the facts.

—Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906)

Every great literature has always been allegorical—allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle.

—“A Defence of Nonsense,” The Defendant

There is one central conception of the Book of Job, which literally makes it immortal, which will make it survive our modern time and our modern philosophies as it has survived many better times and many better philosophies. That is the conception that the universe, if it is to be admired, is to be admired for its strangeness and not for its rationality, for its splendid unreason and not for its reason. Job’s friends attempt to comfort him with philosophical optimism, like the intellectuals of the eighteenth century. Job tries to comfort himself with philosophical pessimism like the intellectuals of the nineteenth century. But God comforts Job with indecipherable mystery, and for the first time Job is comforted.

—“Leviathan and the Hook,” The Speaker, September 9, 1905

It might seem startling and even comic to compare him [Henry James] to Dickens or even to Shakespeare; but what makes him great is what makes them great, and what alone can make a literary man in the ultimate sense great. It is ideas; the power of generating and making vivid an incessant output of ideas. It is untrue to say that what matters is quality and not quantity. Most men have made one good joke in their lives; but to make jokes as Dickens made them is to be a great man. Many forgotten poets have let fall a lyric with one really perfect image; but when we open any play of Shakespeare, good or bad, at any page, important or unimportant, with the practical certainty of finding some imagery that at least arrests the eye and probably enriches the memory, we are putting our trust in a great man.

—“Henry James,” The Common Man (1950) [Cited by Dale Ahlquist in The Soul of Wit: G. K. Chesterton on William Shakespeare (2012)]

Shakespeare and Dickens resemble Dumas, not only in the fact that their bad parts are very bad, but in the fact that their bad parts are very long. When they began talking nonsense they went at it steadily, and there was no doubt about it. You could compile, I should think, the worst book in the world entirely out of selecting passages from the best writers in the world.

—Daily News, January 2, 1907 [Cited by Dale Ahlquist in The Soul of Wit: G. K. Chesterton on William Shakespeare (2012)]

When people say they know their Shakespeare, they generally mean that they know somebody else’s Shakespeare; especially the actor’s Shakespeare, or the actor-manager’s Shakespeare, or the highly modern producer’s Shakespeare, or, what is worst of all, the Shakespearean critic’s Shakespeare. It is the same with all the great creations that are stared at like monuments, rather than quarried in like mines.

—Illustrated London News, January 11, 1936 [Cited by Dale Ahlquist in The Soul of Wit: G. K. Chesterton on William Shakespeare (2012)]

The plays of Shakespeare … may be full of incidental discords, but not one of them ever fails to convey its aboriginal sentiment, that life is as black as the tempest or as green as the greenwood. It is said that art should represent life. So indeed it should, but it labours under the primary disadvantage that no man has seen life at any time. Long records of Whitechapel crime, long rows of Brixton villas, the words which one clerk says to another clerk, the despatches that one diplomatist writes to another diplomatist, none of these things even approach to being life. For life the man of science, even if he lives in the very heart of Brixton, is still searching with a microscope. Life dwells alone in our very heart of hearts, life is one and virgin and unconjured, and sometimes in the watches of the night speaks in its own terrible harmony.

—The Speaker, August 24, 1901 [The Coloured Lands: Fairy Stories, Comic Verse and Fantastic Pictures (1938)]

Nothing is more remarkable in some of the great artistic masterpieces of the world than their startling deficiency in much of that sense of grace and proportion which goes nowadays by the name of art. If art were really what some contemporary critics represent it, a matter of the faultless arrangement of harmonies and transitions, Shakespeare would certainly not be anything like so great an artist as the last poetaster in Fleet-street who published a series of seven sonnets on seven varieties of grey sunset. Shakespeare often suffers from too much inventiveness; that which clogs us and trips us up in his masterpieces is not so much inferior work as irrelevant brilliancy; not so much failures as fragments of other masterpieces. Dickens was designless without knowing or caring; Sterne was designless by design. Yet these great works which mix up abstractions fit for an epic with fooleries not fit for a pantomime, which clash the sword with the red-hot poker, which present such a picture of literary chaos as might be produced if the characters in every book from Paradise Lost to Pickwick broke from their covers and mingled in one mad romance—these great works have assuredly a unity of their own or they would not be works of art. The unity which they have is a unity which when properly understood gives us the key almost of the whole of literary aesthetics: it is the same unity that we find in dreams.

—The Speaker, August 24, 1901 [The Coloured Lands: Fairy Stories, Comic Verse and Fantastic Pictures (1938)]

There is a quality in Chaucer, and in the whole civilization that produced Chaucer, which men of rather wearier civilizations must make a certain effort to understand. It is something that moderns have mainly praised in childhood; because moderns have not preserved it in manhood. It is gusto; it is zest; it is a certain appetite for things as they actually are, and because they actually are; for a stone because it is a stone, or a story because it is a story.

—“The Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer (1932)

Poetry presents things as they are to our emotions, not as they are to any theory, however plausible, or any argument, however conclusive. If love is in truth a glorious vision, poetry will say that it is a glorious vision, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to say that it is the exaggeration of the instinct of sex. If bereavement is a bitter and continually aching thing, poetry will say that it is so, and no philosophers will persuade poetry to say that it is an evolutionary stage of great biological value. And here comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that it is perpetually challenging all systems with the test of a terrible sincerity.… the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this, that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyond the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions arise from a condition of mind. Prose can only use a large and clumsy notation; it can only say that a man is miserable, or that a man is happy; it is forced to ignore that there are a million diverse kinds of misery and a million diverse kinds of happiness. Poetry alone, with the first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the depression is the kind of depression that drives a man to suicide, or the kind of depression that drives him to the Tivoli. Poetry can tell us whether the happiness is the happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, or the much richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church.

—Robert Browning (1908)

… great poets use the telescope and also the microscope. Great poets are obscure for two opposite reasons; now, because they are talking about ...