Just finished this book. I’ll share some quick reflections and excerpts from inside. Tons of huge philosophy in here. I don’t think I completely understand it yet. Chesterton turned out to be a pretty funny guy. If you dig C.S. Lewis, you’ll dig G.K.
“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic; I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.”
“In one sense, all intelligent ideas are narrow. They cannot be broader than themselves.”
“Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity…The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand.”
“The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance.”
“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. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, ‘Why should ANYTHING go right; even observation and deduction?’”
“Every act of will is an act of self limitation.”
“Free thought has exausted it’s own freedom. It is weary of it’s own success. If any eager freethinker now hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set.”
“Art is 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 will really find that ou are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits.”
“A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.”
“Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.”
“The proper form of thanks is some form of humility and restraint; we should thank God for beer and Burgandy by not drinking too much of them.”
“A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absense, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But 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 not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father younger than we.”
“The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.”
“My haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe’s ship – even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.”
“All the optimism of the age had been false and disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the world. The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world.”
“Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”
“Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere. But if Christianity was, as these people said, a thing purely pessimistic and opposed to life, then I was quite prepared to blow up St. Paul’s Cathedral.”
“It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.”
