Quotes from work
Charles Dickens

Source: Charles Dickens (1906), Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"
Context: Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other things, arises merely from this: that we confuse the word "indefinable" with the word "vague." If some one speaks of a spiritual fact as "indefinable" we promptly picture something misty, a cloud with indeterminate edges. But this is an error even in commonplace logic. The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact. It is our arms and legs, our pots and pans, that are indefinable. The indefinable is the indisputable. The man next door is indefinable, because he is too actual to be defined. And there are some to whom spiritual things have the same fierce and practical proximity; some to whom God is too actual to be defined.

“The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact.”

G. K. Chesterton Charles Dickens

Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"
Charles Dickens (1906)
Context: Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other things, arises merely from this: that we confuse the word "indefinable" with the word "vague." If some one speaks of a spiritual fact as "indefinable" we promptly picture something misty, a cloud with indeterminate edges. But this is an error even in commonplace logic. The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact. It is our arms and legs, our pots and pans, that are indefinable. The indefinable is the indisputable. The man next door is indefinable, because he is too actual to be defined. And there are some to whom spiritual things have the same fierce and practical proximity; some to whom God is too actual to be defined.

“Much of our modern difficulty, in religion and other things, arises merely from this: that we confuse the word "indefinable" with the word "vague."”

G. K. Chesterton Charles Dickens

If some one speaks of a spiritual fact as "indefinable" we promptly picture something misty, a cloud with indeterminate edges. But this is an error even in commonplace logic. The thing that cannot be defined is the first thing; the primary fact. It is our arms and legs, our pots and pans, that are indefinable. The indefinable is the indisputable. The man next door is indefinable, because he is too actual to be defined. And there are some to whom spiritual things have the same fierce and practical proximity; some to whom God is too actual to be defined.
Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"
Charles Dickens (1906)

“Fiction means the common things as seen by the uncommon people. Fairy tales mean the uncommon things as seen by the common people.”

G. K. Chesterton Charles Dickens

Source: Charles Dickens (1906), Ch 4 : "The Pickwick Papers"

“Round the birth of "Pickwick" broke one of those literary quarrels that were too common in the life of Dickens.... He turned people into mortal enemies whom he might have turned very easily into immortal jokes.”

G. K. Chesterton Charles Dickens

Source: Charles Dickens (1906), Ch 4 : "The Pickwick Papers"

“We are then able to answer in some manner the question, "Why have we no great men?" We have no great men chiefly because we are always looking for them. We are connoisseurs of greatness, and connoisseurs can never be great; we are fastidious, that is, we are small. When Diogenes went about with a lantern looking for an honest man, I am afraid he had very little time to be honest himself. And when anybody goes about on his hands and knees looking for a great man to worship, he is making sure that one man at any rate shall not be great.”

G. K. Chesterton Charles Dickens

Source: Charles Dickens (1906), Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"

“One of the actual and certain consequences of the idea that all men are equal is immediately to produce very great men.”

G. K. Chesterton Charles Dickens

Source: Charles Dickens (1906), Ch 1 : "The Dickens Period"