Meet a friend of mine: G.K.Chesterton

by Terry 19 Replies latest jw friends

  • Terry
    Terry

    I love the mind of G.K.Chesterton!

    He has a wonderful way of looking at things and then getting you to see them by saying something simple.

    Chesterton was a very creative man who was able to take on every subject with wit and turn things inside out.

    As Wiki describes him:

    He wrote on philosophy, ontology, poetry, plays, journalism, public lectures and debates, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction.

    Consider some of my favorite "sayings" of his and I think you'll like him, too.

    “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.”

    “Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of...... cheese.”

    “The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

    “There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.”
    _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    “The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”

    “Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”

    “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”

    “Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”

    ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    “We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.”

    “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

    “To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”

    “For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”

    _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    “There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.”

    “The man who kills a man kills a man.
    The man who kills himself kills all men.
    As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the whole world.”

    “The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The Business of Conservatives is to prevent others from correcting them."

    “The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.”

    “Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.”

    “Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”

    ___________________________________________________________________________________________________

    “Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it.”

    “With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.”

    “What is the good of words if they aren't important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn't any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn't there be a quarrel about a word? If you're not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about? Are you going to convey your meaning to me by moving your ears? The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only thing worth fighting about.”

  • rip van winkle
    rip van winkle

    This is good, Terry! I only know some of G.K.Chesterton quotes from solving puzzles!

  • moshe
    moshe

    I prefer a writer who actually did something in life, like Samuel Clemens.

  • moshe
    moshe

    two words come to mind-- namby pamby

    His stuff sounds like filler for the Farmer's Almanac that entertained farm families when I was a boy.

    But that is me, raised as a practical person. GK's hands never saw a day of hard labor in his life.

  • AuntBee
    AuntBee

    G K Chesterton defined absent-mindedness as present-mindedness about something else. LOL. Makes me feel a lot better.

    I like the one you gave about tradition.

  • rip van winkle
    rip van winkle
    His stuff sounds like filler for the Farmer's Almanac that entertained farm families

    Moo, Mo!

  • moshe
    moshe

    -Yes what a forward looking thinker he was--

    "the aim of the good woman [being] to rummage in the dustbin".

    "This is cognate with her moral inclination to chastity in the face of masculine concupiscence."

    "There is scarcely any point in female suffrage where it is so little wanted." ( women were just beginning to push for the vote when he wrote that)

    "The saving grace of not having the vote is that it allows a woman to remain above the level of the baying mob."

    What she really needs is liberation from drudgery. A paradise of domestic labour-saving devices will spread more spiritual freedom than would the vote.

    and some satire---. "Boys play football, why shouldn't girls play football ... boys go to Oxford, why shouldn't girls go to Oxford - in short, boys grow mustaches, why shouldn't girls grow mustaches[?]"

  • rip van winkle
    rip van winkle

    More, Mo!

  • moshe
    moshe

    Rub adub dub, oh give me a hug, 'cause I messed up by being a dub, when I followed the words of some batty old farts who wrote like a shark ,

    Common sense told me it was too good to be true, but pride kept me in the Kingdumb hall long after I should have been through.

    I messed up it's true and I can't redo what I didn't do, but tomorrow is new and I know I now have you, a friend who loves me because,

    I'm me and I care about you, too.

    Moshe

  • moshe
    moshe

    Personally, The best writers I know live right here on this forum, my best of friends, all.

    Moshe

Share this

Google+
Pinterest
Reddit