G. K. Chesterton: Quotes about the world

“There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.”

G. K. Chesterton

Child Psychology and Nonsense (15 October 1921)

People , World , Education , Way

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”

G. K. Chesterton

Illustrated London News (1924)
Context: The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.

World , Business

“For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Napoleon of Notting Hill

Opening lines
The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
Context: The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called “Keep to-morrow dark,” and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) “Cheat the Prophet.” The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun.
For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable.

Men , Children , World

“The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Defendant

"In Defence Of A New Edition" - Preface to the second edition (1902)
The Defendant (1901)
Context: The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.

World , Evil

“To have known the things that from the weak are furled,
Perilous ancient passions, strange and high;
It is something to be wiser than the world,
It is something to be older than the sky.”

G. K. Chesterton

Poems (1917), The Great Minimum
Context: To have seen you and your unforgotten face,
Brave as a blast of trumpets for the fray,
Pure as white lilies in a watery space,
It were something, though you went from me today.
To have known the things that from the weak are furled,
Perilous ancient passions, strange and high;
It is something to be wiser than the world,
It is something to be older than the sky.

World , Passion

“Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”

G. K. Chesterton book The Napoleon of Notting Hill

The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
Context: Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

World , Failure

“In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts,
And fattened lives that of their sweetness tire
In a world of flying loves and fading lusts,
It is something to be sure of a desire.”

G. K. Chesterton

Poems (1917), The Great Minimum
Context: In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts,
And fattened lives that of their sweetness tire
In a world of flying loves and fading lusts,
It is something to be sure of a desire.
Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard;
Yea, blessed are our eyes for they have seen:
Let the thunder break on man and beast and bird
And the lightning. It is something to have been.

Love , World , Time , Flying

“What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.”

G. K. Chesterton

"On Bright Old Things — and Other Things" in Sidelights on New London and Newer New York : And Other Essays (1932)

World

“When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics.”

G. K. Chesterton

"The Ethics of Elfland" https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.vii.html in Delphi Works of G. K. Chesterton

Men , Age , World , Faith

“I think that if they gave me leave, Within the world to stand, I would be good through all the day I spent in fairyland. They should not hear a word from me, Of selfishness or scorn, If only I could find the door, If only I were born.”

G. K. Chesterton

By the Babe Unborn poem, Delphi Works of G. K. Chesterton (Illustrated)
Source: https://books.google.com.br/books?id=LtwZAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=pt-BR#v=onepage&q&f=false

World , Thinking , Selfishness

“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”

G. K. Chesterton book Tremendous Trifles

Tremendous Trifles (1909), Ch. 1.

World

“Lord! what a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad!”

G. K. Chesterton book The Napoleon of Notting Hill

The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

World , Madness

“Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.”

G. K. Chesterton

Daily News (18 February 1905)

War , World , Idea , Past

“The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.”

G. K. Chesterton

"Holding on to Romanticism" in The Illustrated London News (2 May 1931)

World

“When people impute special vices to the Christian Church, they seem entirely to forget that the world (which is the only other thing there is) has these vices much more. The Church has been cruel; but the world has been much more cruel. The Church has plotted; but the world has plotted much more. The Church has been superstitious; but it has never been so superstitious as the world is when left to itself.”

G. K. Chesterton

The Illustrated London News (14 December 1907)

People , World , Forgetting

“For we that fight till the world is free,
We are not easy in victory:
We have known each other too long, my brother,
And fought each other, the world and we.”

G. K. Chesterton

A Song of Defeat (1910)

World , Victory , Fight

“The riddle of life is simply this. For some mad reason in this mad world of ours, the things which men differ about most are exactly the things about which they must be got to agree. Men can agree on the fact that the earth goes round the sun. But then it does not matter a dump whether the earth goes around the sun or the Pleiades. But men cannot agree about morals: sex, property, individual rights, fixity and contracts, patriotism, suicide, public habits of health – these are exactly the things that men tend to fight about. And these are exactly the things that must be settled somehow on strict principles. Study each of them, and you will find each of them works back certainly to a philosophy, probably to a religion.”

G. K. Chesterton

According to Larry Azar (Evolution and Other Fairy Tales, AuthorHouse, 2005, p. 470), Chesterton made this statement on 16 March 1907

Life , Men , Health , World

“Q: What's wrong with the world? A: I am.”

G. K. Chesterton

Purportedly a response by Chesterton to the question posed around 1910 by the Times of London (along with other luminaries), but biographer Kevin Belmonte, in 'Defiant Joy: the Remarkable Life & Impact of G.K. Chesterton', was unable to verify. Belmonte surmises its origin in an anecdote that while writing What's Wrong with the World (told in the book's preface), he would delight in telling society ladies that "I have been doing 'What is Wrong' all this morning." http://books.google.com/books?id=1rsXvfW2aiEC
Misattributed

World

“There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of the emptiness of its own theology. […] A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests; and yet this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there is only one Mahomet produces an endless procession of Mahomets.”

G. K. Chesterton

Lord Kitchener (1917), pp. 7–8 https://archive.org/stream/kitchener00chesuoft#page/7/mode/2up

World , Heart

“Bosh," he said, "On what else is the whole world run but immediate impressions? What is more practical? My friend, the philosophy of this world may be founded on facts, but its business is run on spiritual impressions and atmospheres.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Club of Queer Trades

The Club of Queer Trades (1905) Ch. 2 "The Painful Fall of a Great Reputation"

World , Business