G K Chesterton Fairytales Quotes

My first and last philosophy ... I learnt in the nursery ... The things I believed then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales ... They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic ... Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth ... I knew the magic beanstalk before I tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon.
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. ~ G.K. Chesterton

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

The first principle is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is funny. The reaction of his senses and superficial habits of mind against something new, and to him abnormal, is a perfectly healthy reaction. But the mind which imagines that mere unfamiliarity can possibly prove anything about inferiority is a very inadequate mind. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The external fact fertilizes the internal intelligence, as the bee fertilizes the flower. Anyhow, upon that marriage, or whatever it may be called, the whole system of St. Thomas is founded; God made Man so that he was capable of coming in contact with reality; and those whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder. ~ G.K. Chesterton

This clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Our existence may not be an intelligible justice, or even a recognizable wrong. But our existence is still a story. In the fiery alphabet of every sunset is written, "to be continued in our next." If ~ G.K. Chesterton

And when he became conscious of a human figure dark against the silver stream, sitting on a large boulder and looking rather like a large bird, it was perhaps with some of the premonitions proper to a man who meets the strangest friendship of his life. ~ G.K. Chesterton

A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy. ~ G.K. Chesterton

One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I have never been to St. John's Wood. I dare not. I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to come upon a blood red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The psychological substance of the whole thing has altered; the marble has turned to ice; and the ice has melted with most amazing rapidity. The Church was right to refuse even the exception. The world has admitted the exception; and the exception has become the rule. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus;
When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us ~ G.K. Chesterton

Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers. ~ G.K. Chesterton

My best friends are all either bottomless skeptics or quite uncontrollable believers ... ~ G.K. Chesterton

Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else... Every act is an irrevocable selection and exclusion. Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses… 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 you bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel from the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. Somebody wrote a work called "The Loves of the Triangles"; I never read it, but I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his lim ~ G.K. Chesterton

the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.

This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These thing ~ G.K. Chesterton

We are in this fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world. ~ G.K. Chesterton

There has appeared in our time a particular class of books and articles which I sincerely and solemnly think may be called the silliest ever known among men ... these things are about nothing; they are about what is called Success. On every bookstall, in every magazine, you may find works telling people how to succeed. They are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books. To begin with, of course, there is no such thing as Success. Or, if you like to put it so, there is nothing that is not successful. That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey ... I really think that the people who buy these books (if any people do buy them) have a moral, if not a legal, right to ask for their money back. ~ G.K. Chesterton

If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it. ~ G.K. Chesterton

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God. ~ G.K. Chesterton

He made a wild gesture as if to knock the old man's hat off, called out something like "Catch me if you can," and went racing away across the white, open Circus. Concealment was impossible now; and looking back over his shoulder, he could see the black figure of the old gentleman coming after him with long, swinging strides like a man winning a mile race. But the head upon that bounding body was still pale, grave and professional, like the head of a lecturer upon the body of a harlequin. ~ G.K. Chesterton

He had that combination of savoir-faire with a sort of well-groomed coarseness which is not uncommon in young doctors. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The hardest thing to remember about our time, of course, is simply that it is a time- we all instinctively think of it as the Day of Judgment. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Reason is always reasonable, even in the last limbo, in the lost borderland of all things. I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is really the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God Himself is bound by reason. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it. ~ G.K. Chesterton

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

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. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Buddhism seeks after God with the largest conception it can find, the all-producing and all-absorbing One; Christianity seeks after God with the most elementary passion it can find - the craving for a father, the hunger that is as old as the hills. It turns the whole cry of a lost universe into the cry of a lost child. ~ G.K. Chesterton

A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I offer it to you because there exists not only comradeship, but a very different thing, called friendship; an agreement under all the arguments and a thread which, please God, will never break. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Every man who will not have softening of the heart must at last have softening of the brain. ~ G.K. Chesterton