Quotable Quotes from Chesterton’s Masterpiece: “Orthodoxy”
Quotable Quotes from G. K. Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy”
Many literary scholars have said that Orthodoxy was Chesterton’s masterpiece. So instead of regaling the reader here with potentially thousands of worthy Chesterton quotes, I’ll narrow my focus to that particular favorite of mine:
(1.) “There is a motto of the modern world… ‘That man will get on; he believes in himself.’ But the men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin, it is a weakness. Believing utterly in one’s self is a hysterical and superstitious belief.”
(2.) “Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.”
(3.) “How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.”
(4.) ‘Mysticism keeps men sane. The mystic has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The Cross 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. Remember, the one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility.”
(5.) “By asking for pleasure, man has lost the chief pleasure, which is surprise. It is impossible without humility to enjoy anything – even pride. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert – himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt – the Divine Reason.”
(6.) “Tradition is only democracy extended through time, it is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. 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.”
(7.) “My first and last philosophy, that which I believe in with unbroken certainty, I learnt in the nursery. The things I believe most now are the things called fairy tales. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts. I left the fairy tales on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.”
(8.) “Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again!’ Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again!’ to the sun; and every evening ‘Do it again!’ to the moon. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”
(9.) “This world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story; and if there is a story, there is a story-teller.”
(10.) “Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius; and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.”
(11.) “Love is not blind; that is the last thing it is. Love is bound, and the more it is bound the less it is blind.”
(12.) “The mere pursuit of health always leads to something unhealthy. Physical nature must not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not worshipped.”
(13.) “God was a creator, as an artist is a creator. According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage mangers, who had since made a great mess of it.”
(14.) “One must find a way of loving the world without trusting it; somehow one must love the world without being worldly.”
(15.) “Christianity deduces logical truth, and when it suddenly becomes illogical, it has found an illogical truth. It is simple about the simple truth; but it is stubborn about the subtle truth. Whenever we feel that there is something odd in Christian theology, we shall generally find that there is something odd in the truth.”
(16.) “In so far as I am Man, I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man, I am the chief of sinners.”
(17.) “One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.“
(18.) “The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”
(19.) “It is true that the historic Church has at once emphasized celibacy and emphasized the family. It has kept them side by side like two strong colors, red and white. It has always had a healthy hatred of pink. Christianity sought in most cases to keep two colors coexistent but pure.”
(20.) ‘It is true that the Church told some men to fight and others not to fight, and it is true that those who fought were like thunderbolts and those who did not fight were like statues. They existed side by side. Christian doctrine detected the oddities, the hidden eccentricities of life. It not only discovered the law, but it foresaw the exceptions.”
(21.) “Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The Church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless. This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. The Church swerved left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable.”
(22.) We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it. We now add that we must be fond of another world in order to have something to change it to. Progress should mean that we are always walking towards the New Jerusalem. If there is any certain progress it can only be my kind of progress, the progress towards a complete city of virtues and dominations where righteousness and peace contrive to kiss each other.”
(23.) “The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.”
(24.) “We must have in us enough reverence for all things outside us to make us tread fearfully on the grass. It will be an exact and perilous balance, like that of a desperate romance. Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.”
(25.) “A flippant person has asked why we say, ‘Mad as a hatter.’ A more flippant person might answer that a hatter is mad because he has to measure the human head. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
(26.) “A characteristic of the great saints is their levity. Angels can fly, because they can take themselves lightly. There was a deep levity in the Middle Ages. Pride is the downward drag of all things into an easy solemnity. One settles down into a sort of selfish seriousness, but one has to rise to a (merry) self-forgetfulness. Seriousness is not a virtue. Seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one’s self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. For solemnity flows out of people naturally, but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light. Satan fell by force of gravity.”
(27.) “Saints have a cosmic contentment, because they remember that they live in a gloomy town but a merry universe.”
(28.) “The Trinitarian idea… this image of a council at which mercy pleads as well as justice, the conception of a sort of liberty and variety existing even in the inmost chamber of the world. For to us Trinitarians God Himself is a society. It is not well for God to be alone.”
(29.) “To a Christian, existence is a story, and a story is exciting because it has in it so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free will. And Christendom has excelled in the narrative romance exactly because it has insisted on the theological free will.”
(30.) “Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism.”
(31.) “Christianity is a superhuman paradox whereby two opposite passions may blaze beside each other. From some supernatural height it beholds some more startling synthesis.”
(32.) “All other societies die finally and with dignity. We die daily. We are always born again with almost indecent obstetrics. We are living Christians who are dead pagans walking about.”
(33.) “The Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but will almost certainly teach me tomorrow. The man who lives in contact with the living Church is a man always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.”
(34.) “Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. By Christianity’s creed, joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.”