“What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry – but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own sceptical mind, is a doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, so long as he wrote Good Poetry.”
G.K. Chesterton in “About Poetry” in As I Was Saying quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)
“Asses would rather have refuse than gold.”
Heraclitus, quoted by an author whose name I did not record in Chronicles magazine November 1992
“We often hear, ‘Life is short… better enjoy it’! How about, ‘Eternity is long, better prepare for it’!”
Emailed by a friend without attribution April 29, 2024.
“’Christmas is a typical case of the old Christian tradition, precisely because it gathers so many things into itself, including things that are pagan. People talk about Paganism in Christianity, and do not realize that even by that metaphor of measurement they are implying that Christianity is larger than Paganism.’”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly Nov. 11, 1928 quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 15 #2-3 (November-December 2011)
“If we come upon a dead man, we start back in horror. Are we not to start with any generous emotion when we come upon a living man, that far greater mystery? Are we to have any gratitude for the positive miracles of life? We thank a man for passing the mustard; is there indeed nothing that we can thank for the man who passes it?”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Experiment of Mr. Buck” in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, quoted in “Why Do You Ask Me Rhetorical Questions? – 5” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)
“dogma: the serious satisfaction of the mind. Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.”
G.K. Chesterton, “The Victorian Compromise,” in The Victorian Age in Literature, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #3 (Dec. 2002)
“If the dogmas are true, what can you do but try to get men to agree with them?”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Feb. 13, 1906, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“Go back to the idea of government by ideas.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Revolt Against Ideas,” in The Thing, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #6 (4-5/07)