Orthodoxy
1908
Chesterton wrote Orthodoxy because critics complained that his earlier book Heretics only demolished ideas without offering anything in return. So he did something unusual: he wrote a defense of Christianity that reads like an adventure story, recounting his own spiritual wanderings and showing how Christianity answered questions he hadn't even known he was asking. The book is structured as a riddle and its answer, with Chesterton first exploring his own eccentric, solitary speculations before revealing how Christianity satisfied them all. What makes Orthodoxy enduring is its argument that Christianity isn't too narrow for modern minds but actually too wild. The faith that skeptics dismiss as restrictive turns out to embrace precisely the paradoxes and mysteries that rationalism cannot handle. Chesterton's wit crackles on every page, turning philosophy into entertainment while making genuinely profound points about sanity, morality, and the strange adequacy of old beliefs.
Editions
X-Ray
“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
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.””
— 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
