{"author":"G.K. Chesterton","author_id":"G.K.+Chesterton","total_quotes":427,"quotes":[{"text":"There are no uninteresting things, only uninterested people.","author":"G.K. Chesterton","tags":["boredom","human-nature","ignorance"],"id":3208,"author_id":"G.K.+Chesterton"},{"text":"Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion.","author":"G.K. Chesterton","tags":["evil"],"id":3439,"author_id":"G.K.+Chesterton"},{"text":"What the gods are supposed to be, what the priests are commissioned to say, is not a sensational secret like what those running messengers of the Gospel had to say. Nobody else except those messengers has any Gospel; nobody else has any good news; for the simple reason that nobody else has any news.Those runners gather impetus as they run. Ages afterwards they still speak as if something had just happened. Theyhave not lost the speed and momentum of messengers; they have hardly lost, as it were, the wild eyes of witnesses. In the Catholic Church, which is the cohort of the message, there are still those headlong acts of holiness that speak of something rapid and recent; a self-sacrifice that startles the world like a suicide. But it is not a suicide; it is not pessimistic; it is still as optimistic as St. Francis of the flowers and birds. It is newer in spirit than the newest schools of thought; and it is almost certainly on the eve of new triumphs. For these men serve a mother who seems to grow more beautiful as new generations rise up and call her blessed. We might sometimes fancy that the Church grows younger as the world grows old.","author":"G.K. Chesterton","tags":["evangelism","revival","revolution"],"id":5151,"author_id":"G.K.+Chesterton"},{"text":"Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico. If we think what is really best for Pimlico we shall find the thread of thought leads to the throne of the mystic and the arbitrary. It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico; in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico; for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico; to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles… If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is theirs, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.","author":"G.K. Chesterton","tags":["beauty","civilization","history","love"],"id":6841,"author_id":"G.K.+Chesterton"},{"text":"In order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuiseance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential. It may often happen, no doubt, that a drama may be written by somebody else which we like very little. But we should like it still less if the author came before the curtain every hour or so, and forced on us the whole trouble of inventing the next act. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel.","author":"G.K. Chesterton","tags":["choice","heo","life","novel"],"id":11179,"author_id":"G.K.+Chesterton"},{"text":"Don't you believe people when they tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in miracles because they were ignorant. They did it because they were wise, filthily, vilely wise—too wise to eat or sleep or put on their boots with patience.","author":"G.K. Chesterton","tags":["miracles","religion"],"id":11529,"author_id":"G.K.+Chesterton"},{"text":"Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never drink when you are wretched without it, or you will be like the grey-faced gin-drinker in the slum; but drink when you would be happy without it, and you will be like the laughing peasant of Italy. Never drink because you need it, for this is rational drinking, and the way to death and hell. But drink because you do not need it, for this is irrational drinking, and the ancient health of the world.","author":"G.K. Chesterton","tags":["alchohol","drinking"],"id":11681,"author_id":"G.K.+Chesterton"},{"text":"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.","author":"G.K. Chesterton","tags":["cheese","poetry"],"id":13685,"author_id":"G.K.+Chesterton"},{"text":"The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them.","author":"G.K. Chesterton","tags":["travel","wonder"],"id":14532,"author_id":"G.K.+Chesterton"},{"text":"Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it and it will endure a thousand years.","author":"G.K. Chesterton","tags":["society"],"id":14738,"author_id":"G.K.+Chesterton"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":427,"pages":43,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}