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"The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), British author. Gregory, in The Man Who Was Thursday, ch. 1 (1908). |
"There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), British author. Heretics, ch. 3 (1905). |
"The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs.... Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), British author. Heretics, ch. 17 (1908). |
"Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), British author. Heretics, ch. 7 (1905). |
"The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs.... Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), British author. Heretics, ch. 17 (1908). |
"If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), British author. "Humanitarianism and Strength," Intimate Journals (1908). |
"No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), British author. "Humanity: an Interlude," Tremendous Trifles (1909). |
"The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), British poet. The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap (l. 1-4). . .
Oxford Book of Christmas Poems, The. Michael Harrison and Christopher Stuart-Clark, eds. (1983) Oxford University Press. |
"Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), British author. "The Boyhood of Dickens," Charles Dickens (1906). |
"When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), British author. "The Contented Man," A Miscellany of Men (1912). |
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton
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