Your favorite Chesterton quote?

[Charlemagne_II]

Here’s mine:

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”

 

[ricmat]

Here’s 2.

1. “Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.”
2. “Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed.”

 

[Joe_Kelley]

If it is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

That has caused me to pick up several volunteer jobs in the Church; simply because they needed to be done and no one else stepped forward.

 

[juno24]

See my signature line.

 

[Trishie]

If it is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

QUOTE]
That’s a quote that stayed in my mind too.

I know it’s wicked of me but I’ve always remembered an exchange between him and his intellectual opponent Bernard Shaw.

Bernard Shaw was awfully thin.
Chesterton said in the spirit of friendly rivalry, something like
"You look as if there is a famine in England.
Shaw retorted, in reference to Chesterton’s rotund figure,
“And you look as if you caused it”

 

[Trishie]

If it is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

That has caused me to pick up several volunteer jobs in the Church; simply because they needed to be done and no one else stepped forward.

That’s a quote that stayed in my mind too.

I know it’s wicked of me but I’ve always remembered an exchange between him and his intellectual opponent George Bernard Shaw.

Bernard Shaw was awfully thin.
Chesterton said in the spirit of friendly rivalry, something like
"You look as if there is a famine in England.
Shaw retorted, in reference to Chesterton’s rotund figure,
“And you look as if you caused it”

 

[centurionguard]

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
G. K. Chesterton

 

[Detales]

I think this is correct, if not, it is a close paraphrase:

“It’s not that Christianity doesn’t work, it’s just that it hasn’t been tried yet.”

I disagree, in that there are, I think, practitioners. But they do not call themselves, save perhaps a few, “Christians.” But generally speaking, despite apologetics and dogma, I think it is true.

 

[Charlemagne_II]

Trishie’s comment on Shaw and Chesterton reminded me of a verse I once wrote.

Dining Gilbert Chesterton
spilled sauce and ale his big vest on.
He carved his Kant,
mashed his Marx
and buttered his Bertrand Russell.
Then he shouted down the corridor
for some oyster and some mussel.
But last of all, with sweating brow
he opened wide his jaw,
and for dessert he gulped a slice
of good old Bernard Shaw.

 

[Ross09]

I chose my favorite for my signature:

 

[LilyM]

I think this is correct, if not, it is a close paraphrase:

“It’s not that Christianity doesn’t work, it’s just that it hasn’t been tried yet.”

I disagree, in that there are, I think, practitioners. But they do not call themselves, save perhaps a few, “Christians.” But generally speaking, despite apologetics and dogma, I think it is true.

I think you mean “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” Somewhat different in meaning.

I think my favourite is - ‘Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.’ Profound AND funny.

 

[Della]

How about: “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.”

And: “The world doesn’t want a Church that moves with the world but one that moves the world.”

Or “God commanded us to love our neighbor and our enemy–generally because they are the same person.”

As well as: “Break the conventions–keep the commandments.”

Yeah, I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Chestertonian.

 

[fhansen]

"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."

 

[Gardening_Mommy]

“Most men use statistics the way a drunk uses a lightpost; more for support than for illumination.”

Although a close second is, “Why do we consider it a great career for a woman to spend her life teaching other people’s children the Rule of Three [in a math class], but a small career to spend her life teaching her own children about the universe?”

 

[deaconmn]

Here’s mine:

If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
G.K. Chesterton

 

[Janet_S]

“When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.” - Daily News, 7/29/05

Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine after another in a refined scepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals
and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly
broad-minded. Heretics

 

[Aldarion]

“There can never be a nation of millionaires, there has never been a nation of Utopian comrades, but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.”
Gilbert Keith Chesterton

 

[Della]

Just wanted to invite anyone interested in Chesterton, Lewis, Tolkien, Sheen and other such greats to the Inklings Group on CAF. “Come one come all to the dancing lawn!”

 

[cpayne]

That’s a quote that stayed in my mind too.

I know it’s wicked of me but I’ve always remembered an exchange between him and his intellectual opponent George Bernard Shaw.

Bernard Shaw was awfully thin.
Chesterton said in the spirit of friendly rivalry, something like
"You look as if there is a famine in England.
Shaw retorted, in reference to Chesterton’s rotund figure,
“And you look as if you caused it”

Another thin/heavy exchange: Shaw said to Chesterton, “If I were as heavy as you, I’d hang myself.” Chesterton replied, “If I ever have a mind to do so, I’ll use you as the rope.”

 

[alan1941]

Trishie’s comment on Shaw and Chesterton reminded me of a verse I once wrote.

Dining Gilbert Chesterton
spilled sauce and ale his big vest on.
He carved his Kant,
mashed his Marx
and buttered his Bertrand Russell.
Then he shouted down the corridor
for some oyster and some mussel.
But last of all, with sweating brow
he opened wide his jaw,
and for dessert he gulped a slice
of good old Bernard Shaw.

Wel done! Faithful poet!