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| GILBERT K. CHESTERTON |
| �No philosopher who was really philosophical could think anything except that, in the central sea, the wave of the world had risen to its highest, seeming to touch the stars. But the wave was already stooping; for it was only the wave of the world.� [about the Roman Empire] ~The Everlasting Man
�Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something. Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else.� ~The Everlasting Man �Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgments; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard.� ~The Everlasting Man �One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen.� ~The Everlasting Man �People cannot easily get rid of the mental confusion of feeling that the foundations of history must be safe; that the biggest generalisation must be obvious. But though the contradiction may seem to them a paradox, this is the very contrary of the truth. It is the large thing that is secret and invisible; it is the small thing that is evident and enormous.� ~The Everlasting Man �The average man votes below himself; he votes with half a mind or a hundredth part of one. A man ought to vote with the whole of himself, as he worships or gets married. A man ought to vote with his head and heart, his soul and stomach, his eye for faces and his ear for music; also (when sufficiently provoked) with his hands and feet. If he has ever seen a fine sunset,t he crimson colour of it should creep into his vote... The question is not so much whether only a minority of the electorate votes. The point is that only a minority of the voter votes.� �The best authorities see to think that though Confucianism is in one sense agnosticism, it does not directly contradict the old theism, precisely because it has become a rather vague theism. It is one in which God is called Heaven, as in the case of polite persons tempted to swear in drawing-rooms� We have all the impression of a simple truth that has receded, until it was remote without ceasing to be true.� ~The Everlasting Man �The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.� |