Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton
I’ve been reading Chesteron’s Orthodoxy, and I thought I’d share some of my favorite passages (thus far):
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way.
How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller!
A Christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted. He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist.
The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest spec of spirtualism or miracle.
Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
Mysticism keeps one sane.
But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its center it can grow without changing. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers.
What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. …a man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth.
We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication tables. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own.
Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
In the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.
I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armagedoon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election [E note: well, not me, so much...]
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.
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
Remember..that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable.
It may be that our tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galaxies, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain.
[T]he materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought.
This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price; for there cannot be another one.
[T]he proper form of thanks to it is some fore of humility and retraint.
We ow[e]…an obedience to whatever made us.
