Orthodoxy
1908
G.K. Chesterton was the finest contrarian of his generation, a man who could defend Christianity by first demolishing every intellectual fashion of his age. In Orthodoxy, he completes a project begun in Heretics: not merely to critique the fashionable philosophies of modernity, but to explain how he came to believe something definite and positive. The result is part intellectual autobiography, part philosophical warfare, and wholly delightful. Chesterton's method is the paradox: he argues that the madman is not the man who has lost his sanity, but the man who has lost everything except his reason. He contends that the Christian story is the only one that accounts for the full catastrophe of human experience, including the existence of evil, the hunger for meaning, and the desperate need for romance in a world grown gray. Over a century later, Orthodoxy endures because it refuses to let its readers rest comfortably in skepticism. It is for anyone who has ever suspected that modern agnosticism offers less than it promises, and who craves a thinker willing to wager everything on the adventure of belief.
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“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
— G. K. Chesterton
“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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
— G. K. Chesterton
“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
— G. K. Chesterton
“The man who kills a man kills a man.The man who kills himself kills all men.As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.”
— G. K. Chesterton
“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
— G. K. Chesterton
“Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.”
— G. K. Chesterton
“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”
— G. K. Chesterton
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
— G. K. Chesterton
“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
— G. K. Chesterton
