The Everlasting Man Quotes
Religious studies books, Works by G. K. Chesterton
Top Quotes
“Men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion.”
“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
“Wikipedia: The Everlasting Man”
“Egypt exhibits, in that brief record of its remotest beginnings, the primary problem of liberty and civilisation.”
“Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy.”
“When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.”
“Christ said 'Seek first the kingdom, and all these things shall be added unto you.' Buddha said 'Seek first the kingdom, and then you will need none of these things.'”
“There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of "pretending"; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat.”
“All the great groups that stood about the Cross represent in one way or another the great historical truth of the time; that the world could not save itself.”
“The Church had to maintain the same Trinity, which is simply the logical side of love, against another appearance of the isolated and simplified deity in the religion of Islam.”
“But the dogmatism of Darwinians has been too strong for the agnosticism of Darwin; and men have insensibly fallen into turning this entirely negative term into a positive image.”
“My criticism is strictly relative; I may say that the pyramids are plainer than the tracks of the desert; without denying that wiser men than I may see tracks in what is to me the trackless sand.”
“Socrates, the wisest man, knows that he knows nothing. A lunatic may think he is omniscience, and a fool may talk as if he were omniscient. But Christ is in another sense omniscient if he not only knows, but knows that he knows.”
“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk 'round the whole world till we come back to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote.”
“If the Church had not insisted on theology, it would have melted into a mad mythology of the mystics, yet further removed from reason or even from rationalism; and, above all yet further removed from life and from the love of life.”
“So far as any human character can be hinted at by such traces of the past, that human character is quite human and even humane. It is certainly not the ideal of an inhuman character, like the abstraction invoked in popular science.”
“Round the family do indeed gather the sanctities that separate men from ants and bees. Decency is the curtain of that tent; liberty is the wall of that city; property is but the family farm; honour is but the family flag.”
“To compare the Christian and Confucian religions is like comparing a theist with an English squire or asking whether a man is a believer in immortality or a hundred-per-cent American. Confucianism may be a civilisation but it is not a religion.”
“Now it is very right to rebuke our own race or religion for falling short of our own standards and ideals. But it is absurd to pretend that they fell lower than the other races and religions that professed the very opposite standards and ideals.”