“Hail Mary, thou blessed among women, generations shall rise up to greet,
After ages of wrangles and dogma, I come with a prayer to thy feet.
Where Gabriel’s red plumes were a wind in the lanes of thy lilies at eve,
We love, who have done with the churches, we worship, who may not believe.
Shall I reck that the chiefs we revolt with, stern elders with scoff and with frown,
Have scourged from thine altar the kneelers, and reft from thy forehead the crown?
For God’s light for the world has burnt through it, the thought whereof thou wert the sign,
As a sign, for all faiths are as symbols, as human, and man is divine. We know that men prayed to their image and crowned their own passions as powers, We know that their gods were their shadows, nor are ‘shamed of this queen that was ours: We know as the people the priest is, as the men are the goddess shall be, And all harlots were worshipped in Cyprus, all maidens and mothers in thee. Who shall murmur of dreams or be sour when the tale of thy …Mehr

1. Love precedes lovability: "Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her."
2. Modern streets are "noisy with taxicabs and motorcars," but that's the noise of "laziness and fatigue," not activity. If everyone walked, streets would be quieter but more alive. Modern thought is like a modern street - noisiness, long words, loud ideas...hiding laziness
3. The paradox of fairytales: "All the beauty of a fairy-tale lies in this: that the prince has a wonder which just stops short of being fear. If he is afraid of the giant, there is an end of him; but also if he is not astonished at the giant, there is an end of the fairytale"
4. How to think about the environment around us: "This is not a world, but rather the material for a world. God has given us not so much the colors of a picture as the colors of a palette. But he has also given us a subject, a model, a fixed vision..."
5. Healthy men have bandwidth for superfluity: "It's the happy man who does …Mehr

It is very good for a man to talk about what he does not understand; as long as he understands that he does not understand it. Agnosticism (which has, I am sorry to say, almost entirely disappeared from the modern world) is always an admirable thing, so long as it admits that the thing which it does not understand may be much superior to the mind which does not understand it.
A Handful of Authors. p.163.
There is still a notion that the agnostic can remain secure of this world, so long as he does not wish to be what is called "other-worldly.” He can be content with common sense about men and women, so long as he is not curious of mysteries about angels and archangels. It is not true. The questions of the sceptic strike direct at the heart of this our human life; they disturb this world, quite apart from the other world; and it is exactly common sense that they disturb most. There could not be a better example than this queer appearance, in my youth, of the determinist as a demagogue; …Mehr

An adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose. Falling in love has been often regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident. In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves, something of a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true. Love does take us and transfigure and torture us. It does break our hearts with an unbearable beauty, like the unbearable beauty of music. But in so far as we have certainly something to do with the matter; in so far as we are in some sense prepared to fall in love and in some sense jump into it; in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some extent even judge—in all this falling in love is not truly romantic, is not truly adventurous at all. In this degree the supreme adventure is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed …Mehr

“The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate... effort to persuade other people how good they are.”
“He is a sane man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”
“In history... the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him... While the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.”
“The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum... that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other... When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings.”
“The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.”
“Reason is always a kind of brute force... Those who appeal to the head rather than …Mehr

The thatch of the roof was as golden,
Though dusty the straw was and old,
The wind was a peal as of trumpets,
Though blowing and barren and cold.
The mother's hair was a glory,
Though loosened and torn,
For under the eaves in the gloaming—
A child was born. Oh! if man sought a sign in the deepest, That God shaketh broadest His best; That things fairest, are oldest and simplest, In the first days created and blest. Far flush all the tufts of the clover, Thick mellows the corn, A cloud shapes, a daisy is opened— A child is born. Though the darkness be noisy with systems, Dark fancies that fret and disprove; Still the plumes stir around us, above us, The wings of the shadow of love. Still the fountains of life are unbroken, Their splendour unshorn; The secret, the symbol, the promise— A child is born. In the time of dead things it is living, In the moonless grey night is a gleam; Still the babe that is quickened may conquer, The life that is new may redeem. Ho! princes and priests, have ye …Mehr

"I had an idea. I would take the risk of introducing him {Tolkien} to a new machine that I had in the house and was trying out because it seemed that it should have some valuable educational applications. It was a large black box, a Ferrograph, an early-model tape recorder. To confront him with it was a risk because he had made it clear that he disliked all machinery. He might curse it and curse me with it, but there was a chance that he would be interested in recording on it, in hearing his own voice.
"He was certainly interested. First he recorded the Lord's Prayer in Gothic to cast out the devil that was sure to be in it since it was a machine. This was not just whimsy. All of life was for him part of a cosmic conflict between good and evil, God and the devil. I played it back to him. He was surprised and very pleased. He sounded much better than he had expected..'You know', he said, 'they are all wrong. The publishers are wrong and I am wrong to have lost faith in my own work. I am …Mehr

WHITE FOUNTS falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss, And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross. The cold queen of England is looking in the glass; The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass; From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun, And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun. Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard, Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred, Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall, The last knight of Europe …Mehr

I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion’s) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The thistledown made them weep; a burnished …Mehr

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism.
If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing.
At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are …Mehr

The Donkey by GK Chesterton
When fishes flew and forests walked
And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody On all four-footed things. The tattered outlaw of the earth, Of ancient crooked will; Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb, I keep my secret still. Fools! For I also had my hour; One far fierce hour and sweet: There was a shout about my ears, And palms before my feet.

„Das Unglaublichste an Wundern ist, dass sie tatsächlich geschehen.“
„Die Bibel sagt uns, dass wir unsere Nächsten lieben sollen und auch unsere Feinde; wahrscheinlich deshalb, weil es sich im Allgemeinen um dieselben Menschen handelt“.
„Die Schwierigkeit, zu erklären, warum ich katholisch bin, besteht darin, dass es zehntausend Gründe gibt, die alle auf einen Grund hinauslaufen: dass Katholizismus wahr ist.“
„Die ganze moderne Welt hat sich in Konservative und Progressive aufgeteilt. Die Aufgabe der Progressiven ist es, immer Fehler zu machen. Die Aufgabe der Konservativen ist es, zu verhindern, dass die Fehler korrigiert werden.“
„Die moderne Stadt ist nicht hässlich, weil sie eine Stadt ist, sondern weil sie nicht genug Stadt ist, weil sie ein Dschungel ist, weil sie verworren und anarchisch ist und vor egoistischen und materialistischen Energien strotzt.“
„Götzendienst wird nicht nur begangen, indem man falsche Götter aufstellt, sondern auch, indem man falsche Teufel aufstellt; indem …Mehr

The following essay was first published by The Illustrated London News on St. Stephen’s Day in 1925 and it conveys GK Chesterton’s thoughts on commercial efforts at trying to create a Christmas without Christianity.
An article on "Christmas Old and New" appeared recently in a magazine, and said many things that many people are probably saying just now. I do not say they are very lucid things, but they revolve round a reality and something sincerely if vaguely felt.
They raise all the talk about tradition and change; about keeping the spirit but not the letter; about suiting something to modern conditions, and so on. We have heard a good deal about these things; unfortunately, we have not heard much sense about them.
For it has become a convention to say we must disregard conventions; and the demand for something new is already old enough to be in its dotage or (if we had luck) in its coffin. But I notice one rather queer paradox about all this talk of change or reform in customs like …Mehr

From Chesterton's 1917 biography of Lord Kitchener:
"There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the emptiness of its own theology. It affirms, with no little sublimity, something that is not merely the singleness but rather the solitude of God. There is the same extreme simplification in the solitary figure of the Prophet; and yet this isolation perpetually reacts into its own opposite. A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests; and yet this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very …Mehr

The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother.
The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate.
This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity.

Truly prophetic insight from GKC:
"The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the Government will really help it to persecute its heretics. Vaccination, in its hundred years of experiment, has been disputed almost as much as baptism in its approximate two thousand. But it seems quite natural to our politicians to enforce vaccination; and it would seem to them madness to enforce baptism."
- G.K. Chesterton, "Eugenics and Other Evils," 1922