Monday, December 19, 2011

Chesterton Quotes

       Author G.K. Chesterton is a well respected thinker, especially among traditionalist Catholics and cultural conservatives. Sometimes I agree with him but many times I strongly disagree with him. I do appreciate his way of reasoning however. He also has some one liners that I love- even though I may or may not agree with what was on his mind when he made them.
* "An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered."
* "And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow."
* "All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry."
* "A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things."
* "Coincidences are spiritual puns."
* "Drink because you are happy, not because you are miserable."
* "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."
* "If you don't understand a man you cannot crush him; And if you do understand him very probably you will not."
* "A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
* "If I only had one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride."
* "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."
* "It is the test of good religion whether you can joke about it."
* "Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always loose organization."
* "One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star."
* "The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them."
* "Science in the modern world has many uses; it's chief use however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich."
* "The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man."
* "The reformer is usually right about what's wrong in the world, but he is often wrong about what's right."
All of the above by: Gilbert Keith Chesterton
       The last one is my favorite. Quoting famous intellectuals and philosophers is not something I like to do too often. I tend to find it tacky when motivational speakers constantly do this, but here I hand picked only the ones I really find relevant.

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