 |
| GILBERT K. CHESTERTON |
| �In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity in the idea of seeking for a place with a most dark and deep and mysterious levity about all the places found.� ~The Everlasting Man
�In one sense it is a true paradox that there was history before history. But it is not the irrational paradox implied in prehistoric history; for it is a history we do not know. Very probably it was exceedingly like the history we do know, except in the one detail that we do not know it.� ~The Everlasting Man �In the days of my youth the Religion of Humanity was a term commonly applied to Comtism, the theory of certain rationalists who worshipped corporate mankind as a Supreme Being. Even in the days of my youth, I remarked that there was something slightly odd about despising and dismissing the doctrine of the Trinity as a mystical and even maniacal contradiction; and then asking us to adore a deity who is a hundred million persons in one God, neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.� ~The Everlasting Man �Instead of dividing religion geographically and as it were vertically, into Christian, Moslem, Brahmin, Buddhist, and so on, I would divide it psychologically and in some sense horizontally; into the strata of spiritual elements and influences that could sometimes exist in the same country, or even in the same man.� ~The Everlasting Man �It is true that something in our nature and conditions makes many stories similar; but each of them may be original. One man does not borrow the story from the other man, though he may tell it from the same motive as the other man.� ~The Everlasting Man �It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.� �Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.� �Let any lad who has had the luck to grow up sane and simple in his day-dreams of love hear for the first time of the cult of Ganymede; he will not be merely shocked but sickened.� ~The Everlasting Man �Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.� �Men do not believe as a dogma that God would throw a thunderbolt at them for walking under a ladder; more often they amuse themselves with the not very laborious exercise of walking round it.� ~The Everlasting Man �My country right or wrong, is a thing no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, �My mother, drunk or sober!� � �mythology grows more and more complicated, and the very complication suggests that at the beginning it was more simple.� ~The Everlasting Man |