Frances Chesterton Quotes

Frances cared about people. Her personality was such that she was deeply interested in making sure the people around her were happy and knew someone cared about them. She was humble and selfless, and she rarely spoke about herself, preferring to stay in the background and let the other have center stage. She had a good memory. Frances would patiently listen, and was carefully observant and noticed if someone was feeling out of sorts ~ Nancy Carpentier Brown

It is very foolish of a man to be frightened of a skeleton, for Nature has put an insurmountable obstacle against running away from it. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden. ~ G.K. Chesterton

It has already been observed that women, wherever placed, however high or low in the scale of cultivation, hold the destinies of human kind. Men will ever rise or fall to the level of the other sex. ~ Frances Wright

Original sin is the only doctrine that's been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

Temperance is moderation in the things that are good and total abstinence from the things that are foul. ~ Frances E. Willard

Defining child care primarily as women's sphere reinforces the devaluing of women and prevents their equal access to power. ~ Mary Frances Berry

Her moment came. Nobody was looking. She sidled quickly across the deck and lost herself among the crates that clustered at the base of the boat's shuddering, discoloured funnel. The air tasted of salt and guilt, and she felt alive. ~ Frances Hardinge

Something lay in the shadow at the foot of the ridge, as stiff as the stick of the fallen rocket; and the man who knew too much knew what is worth knowing. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The existing principle of selfish interest and competition has been carried to its extreme point; and, in its progress, has isolated the heart of man, blunted the edge of his finest sensibilities, and annihilated all his most generous impulses and sympathies. ~ Frances Wright

The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times. ~ G.K. Chesterton

alcoves, and once or twice he sat down ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

The most effective kind of propaganda is defined as the kind where the subject moves in the direction you desire for reasons which he believes to be his own. ~ Frances Stonor Saunders

The snow, which had fallen quietly at first, was now pelting against the windowpanes, driven by a wicked wind; the storm was rapidly assuming proportions of a blizzard. ~ Frances Parkinson Keyes

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The ancient voices that speak in Scripture evoke an ongoing dialogue that requires our active participation. Their sacred conversation about life in God's presence begs to be continued among believers today, for the fact of the matter is, the Bible is not self-interpreting. It is a living word through which God continues to meet us and speak to us in our own particular historical moment, and thus it demands to be newly interpreted for new historical situations. And interpretation is not simply reiteration of the text, repeating what was said before, but the hard work of bringing it into our own time and place. So every new generation of believers must join the interpretive conversation as it experiences the living God in relation to new circumstances. ~ Frances Taylor Gench

Ordinary people have an extremely important role to play in fighting climate change. Not only can you make your home more energy efficient, drive less, and eat more local food - you can also tell your leaders to take climate action. ~ Frances Beinecke

A man can never quite understand a boy, even when he has been a boy. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

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. ~ G.K. Chesterton

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

In waking to the strangeness of the world, many of us become strangers in our own homes. But home is where we start and where we shall someday return. The path between has been marked out for us by a Savior who became the prodigal from heaven, journeying into the far country to bring us home with Him. He is both the end of our exploring and its liberating transformation. It is Jesus who has already profaned the mysteries of God by making the unknown at the center known to us: he who has seen Jesus has seen the Father. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I didn't think then, and I still don't, that I was actually sick. ~ Frances Farmer

I have learned that to have a good friend is the purest of all God's gifts, for it is a love that has no exchange of payment. ~ Frances Farmer

His soul swayed in a vertigo of moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made to a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as the square beneath him. He had, on the other other hand, only to keep his antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber. Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortable policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he looked back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly studying him with big, unbearable eyes. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Eugenics, as discussed, evidently means the control of some men
over the marriage and unmarriage of others; and probably means the
control of the few over the marriage and unmarriage of the many ~ G.K. Chesterton

I came into an environment that was already grounded spiritually, so that helped me a lot. ~ Frances Newton

[The materialist] thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think [the materialist] a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

A waiter came swiftly along the room, and then stopped dead. His stoppage was as silent as his tread; but all those vague and kindly gentlemen were so used to the utter smoothness of the unseen machinery which surrounded and supported their lives, that a waiter doing anything unexpected was a start and a jar. They felt as you and I would feel if the inanimate world disobeyed
if a chair ran away from us. ~ G.K. Chesterton

It is to be feared that about a hundred detective stories have begun with the discovery that an American millionaire has been murdered; an event which is, for some reason, treated as a sort of calamity. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. 'Odd, isn't it,' he said, 'that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man? ~ G.K. Chesterton

Do you remember what Douglas said when Marmion, his guest, offered to shake hands with him?" "Yes," said Father Brown. "'My castles are my king's alone, from turret to foundation stone,'" said Musgrave. "'The hand of Douglas is his own.'" He ~ G.K. Chesterton

tradition is truer than fashion. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Passion makes every detail important. ~ G.K. Chesterton

People know that pursuing a mission without achieving results is dispiriting; achieving results without a mission is meaningless. ~ Frances Hesselbein

Into a passion and beat and kicked her, she looked only ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex; they can breed thoughts. ~ G.K. Chesterton

How do they know what to do?" Mary Frances said. "To just rip into a building like that and expect it to stay standing."
"For the parts you want to stay standing," Tim said.
"Exactly."
"Practice," Al said. "And of course, one of them is in charge."
Mary Frances studied the tangle of men, all dressed alike, movingly easily together. "I can't tell them apart."
"Well, it's like war, I guess," Al said. "If you knew whom to blame, it'd be too easy to shoot him. ~ Ashley Warlick

Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual. ~ Frances Power Cobbe

There is one insane little hope that I cannot get out of my mind. the power of this whole planet is against us, yet I cannot help wondering whether this one silly little hope is hopeless yet.
"In what or whom is your hope?" asked Syme with curiosity.
"In a man I never saw," said the other, looking at the leaden sea.
"I know what you mean," said Syme in a low voice, "the man in the dark room. But Sunday must have killed him by now."
"Perhaps," said the other steadily; "but if so, he was the only man whom Sunday found it hard to kill. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I should say that psycho-analysis was confession without absolution. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

AKIHI n. Listening to directions and then walking off and promptly forgetting them means that you've gone "akihi." When they explained how to get there, their directions all made perfect sense - you nodded and looked back with clear understanding. Then you parted ways, and now you can't remember whether to take a left or a right. noun ~ Ella Frances Sanders

For these disguises did not disguise, but reveal. ~ G.K. Chesterton

What had happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world was coloured by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural passions. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Nothing is important except the fate of the soul; and literature is only redeemed from an utter triviality ... by the fact that it describes not the world around us, or the things on the retina of the eye, or the enormous irrelevancy of encyclopedias, but some condition to which the human spirit can come. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Many are called impious, not for having a worse, but a different religion from their neighbors; and many atheistical, not for the denying of God, but for thinking somewhat peculiarly concerning him. ~ Frances Wright