G.K. Chesterton:
Tolerance is the virtue of people who don’t believe anything.*
Quoted in The American Hour, by Os Guinness, New York: The Free Press, A Division of macmillan, Inc, 1993, page 174).
Archive for the 'Chesterton' Category
G.K. Chesterton famously said that, “Tolerance is the virtue of people who don’t believe anything.” Here Carson explains how the connotation of “tolerance” has changed over time.
HT: Z
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), “Introduction to the Book of Job”:
The modern habit of saying “Every man has a different philosophy; this is my philosophy and it suits me”—the habit of saying this is mere weak-mindedness. A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.
HT: Andy Naselli
The imminently quotable G.K. Chesterton:
One can find no meanings in a jungle of skepticism; but the man will find more and more meanings who walks through a forest of doctrine and design. Here everything has a story tied to its tail, like the tools or pictures in my father’s house; for it is my father’s house. I end where I began—at the right end. I have entered at least the gate of all good philosophy. I have come into my second childhood.
Quoted by Michael Horton in his recommended Gospel-Driven Life, The: Being Good News People in a Bad News World.
G.K. Chesteron:
It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith.
Quoted in Kelly Clark, Return to Reason, page 123.
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. Orthodoxy, page 170.
. . . But to avoid them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the will truth reeling but erect. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, page 103.
A few days ago I was thinking of how I would make initial introduction to myself in England where I would be preaching. In explaining my convictions to a new audience, it seemed appropriate to quote two quotable Brits.
First, there is the comment that Churchill made when someone complimented one of his detractors as being a humble man. Churchill agreed, stating dryly:
Yes, he is a modest man, and he has much to be modest about.
I pray I’m modest; I know that I have much to be modest about.
While I do strive for humility, Chesterton pointed out that there is a wrong sort of modesty which is not a good thing.
G.K. Chesterton said,
But what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn. Thus we should be wrong if we had said hastily that there is no humility typical of our time. The truth is that there is a real humility typical of our time; but it so happens that it is practically a more poisonous humility than the wildest prostrations of the ascetic. The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him, work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.” (Orthodoxy, chapter 3).
And,
We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.
