The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]

Now, there are lingering still in the world a number of lunatics, among whom I have the honour to count myself, who think it a good thing to preserve as many whole jobs as possible. We congratulate ourselves, in our crazy fashion, whenever we find anybody personally and completely doing anything.

This boy who dropped down groaning at his work, who was hungry four or five times a week, whose best feelings and worst feelings were alike flayed alive, was the man on whom two generations of comfortable critics have visited the complaint that his view of life was too rosy to be anything but unreal.

The human race has always admired the Catholic virtues, however little it can practise them; and oddly enough it has admired most those of them that the modern world most sharply disputes. You complain of Catholicism for setting up an ideal of virginity; it did nothing of the kind. The whole human race set up an ideal of virginity; the Greeks in At

the ancient and often barbaric kind of humour that goes by the name of the pun.

This optimism does exist—this optimism which is more hopeless than pessimism—this optimism which is the very heart of hell.

And it amuses me to notice that the very Agnostics who still quote Galileo’s phrase about the earth, “And yet it moves!” are the very people who talk as if truth could be different from age to age—as

How little the actual boy cares for incidents in comparison to tools and weapons may be tested by the fact that the most popular story of adventure is concerned with a man who lived for years on a desert island with two guns and a sword, which he never had to use on an enemy.

the rough upshot of it was something like this: that some traditions too old to be traced came in vague conflict with some theories much too new to be tested. Many things three thousand years old had forgotten their reason for existing; many things a few years old had not yet discovered theirs.

For of all the shapes in which that immense illusion called materialism can terrify the soul, perhaps the most oppressive are big buildings.