The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” (The Everlasting Man Quotes)
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“And the greatest of the poets, when he defined the poet, did not say that he gave us the universe or the absolute or the infinite; but, in his own larger language, a local habitation and a name.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. 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.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“For our law has in it a turn of humour or touch of fancy which Nero and Herod never happened to think of; that of actually punishing homeless people for not sleeping at home.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Here Christ was indeed human; but more human than a human being was then likely to be. Peter Pan does not belong to the world of Pan but the world of Peter.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Man does not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much the same thing, because he is exhausted”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Mysticism conceives something transcending experience; religion seeks glimpses of a better good or a worse evil than experience can give. Reincarnation need only extend experiences in the sense of repeating them.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“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. It is when for some reason or other good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Plato in some sense anticipated the Catholic realism, as attacked by the heretical nominalism, by insisting on the equally fundamental fact that ideas are realities; that ideas exist just as men exist. Plato however seemed sometimes almost to fancy that ideas exist as men do not exist; or that the men need hardly be considered where they conflict with the ideas.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do. ”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“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…”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“These men were conscious of the Fall, if they were conscious of nothing else; and the same is true of all heathen humanity. Those who have fallen may remember the fall, even when they forget the height. Some such tantalising blank or break in memory is at the back of all pagan sentiment.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“We are Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key, but because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is the trumpet of liberty blow over the land of the living.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
