10 ideas from G.K. Chesterton's book Orthodoxy (1908)

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 the useless things; the sick man isn't strong enough to be idle. It's exactly such careless and causeless actions that the madman could never understand...he generally sees too much cause in everything"

6. Humility then and now: "The old humility made a man doubtful. about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether."

7. Art needs limitation: "The essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you'll really find that you're not free to draw a giraffe"

8. Impossible to critique without standards: "When little boys in the street laugh at the fatness of some distinguished journalist, they are unconsciously assuming a standard of Greek sculpture..."

9. Why its anti-democratic to ignore tradition: "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..."

10. Emptiness of the atheist's worldview: He has "nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine