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| GILBERT K. CHESTERTON |
| �The temptation of the philosophers is simplicity rather than subtlety. They are always attracted by insane simplifications, as men poised above abysses are fascinated by death and nothingness and the empty air.� ~The Everlasting Man
�The truth is that the thing most present to the mind of man is not the economic machinery necessary to his existence; but rather that the existence itself; the world which he sees when he wakes every morning and the nature of his general position in it.� ~The Everlasting Man �The ultimate question is why they go at all; and anybody who really understands that question will know that it always has been and always will be a religious question; or at any rate a philosophical or metaphysical question.� [in regards to biological processes] ~The Everlasting Man �The very name of the horse has been given to the highest mood and moment of the man; so that we might almost say that the handsomest compliment to a man is to call him a horse.� [in regards to chivalry] ~The Everlasting Man �The word good has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.� �There are a good many fools who call me a friend, and also a good many friends who call me a fool.� �There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.� ~The Everlasting Man �There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.� �There is a very good reason to suppose that many people did begin with the simple but overwhelming idea of one God who governs all; and afterwards fell away into such things as demon-worship almost as a sort of secret dissipation. Even the test of savage beliefs, of which the folk-lore students are so fond, is admittedly often found to support such a view. Some of the very rudest savages, primitive in every sense in which anthropologists use the word, the Australian aborigines for instance, are found to have a pure monotheism with a high moral tone.� ~The Everlasting Man �There is nothing that fails like success.� �There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.� �They are obsessed by their evolutionary monomania that every great thing grows from a seed, or something smaller than itself. They seem to forget that every seen comes from a tree, or from something larger than itself.� ~The Everlasting Man �They talk of searching for the habits and habitat of the Missing Link; as if one were to talk of being on friendly terms with the gap in a narrative or the hole in an argument, of taking a walk with a non-sequitur or dining with an undistributed middle.� ~The Everlasting Man |