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| GILBERT K. CHESTERTON |
| �Any agnostic or athiest whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and imagination can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see the need of the connection.� ~The Everlasting Man
�any number of normal doubts and day-dreams are about existence; not about how we can live, but about why we do. And the proof of it is simple; as simple as suicide.� ~The Everlasting Man �Art is the signature of man.� ~The Everlasting Man �Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.� �As to what it means, a man will learn far more about it by lying on his back in a field, and merely looking at the sky, than by reading all the libraries even of the most learned and valuable folk-lore.� [regarding �ultimate ideas�] ~The Everlasting Man �Atheism became really possible in that abnormal time; for atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. it is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees.� ~The Everlasting Man �But evolution really is mistaken for explanation. It has the fatal quality of leaving on many minds the impression that they do understand it and everything else; just as many of them live under a sort of illusion that they have read the Origin of Species.� ~The Everlasting Man �But how much would it matter that the worst was dead if the best was dying?� ~The Everlasting Man �But I am concerned rather with an internal than an external truth; and, as I have already said, the internal truth is almost indescribable. We have to speak of something of which it is the whole point that people did not speak of it; we have not merely to translate from a strange tongue or speech, but from a strange silence.� ~The Everlasting Man �But the first chapters of the romance have been torn out of the book; and we shall never read them.� ~The Everlasting Man �But the point about them is that they all think that existence can be represented by a diagram instead of a drawing; and the rude drawings of childish myth-makers are a sort of crude and spirited protest against that view. They cannot believe that religion is really not a pattern but a picture. Still less can they believe that it is a picture of something that really exists outside our minds.� ~The Everlasting Man �But the point of the puzzle is this: that all this vagueness and variation arise from the fact that the whole thing began in fancy and in dreaming; and that there are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.� ~The Everlasting Man |