G.K. Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton was a British journalist, theologian, philosopher who died in 1936. C.S. Lewis considered Chesterton to be his spiritual father. Here are a few selected quotes from Chesterton's book, "Orthodoxy":
On his journey to Christian orthodoxy:
"I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before...I tried to be ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it."
On Symbols:
"...the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its center, it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers."
On "Believing in yourself":
"The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums...Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief."
On Rationalism vs. Mysticism:
"Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom...Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets."
"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
"The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. ...That transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name."
On his journey to Christian orthodoxy:
"I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before...I tried to be ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it."
On Symbols:
"...the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its center, it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers."
On "Believing in yourself":
"The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums...Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness. Believing utterly in one's self is a hysterical and superstitious belief."
On Rationalism vs. Mysticism:
"Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom...Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets."
"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."
"The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility. Detached intellectualism is (in the exact sense of a popular phrase) all moonshine; for it is light without heat, and it is secondary light, reflected from a dead world. ...That transcendentalism by which all men live has primarily much the position of the sun in the sky. We are conscious of it as of a kind of splendid confusion; it is something both shining and shapeless, at once a blaze and a blur. But the circle of the moon is as clear and unmistakable, as recurrent and inevitable, as the circle of Euclid on a blackboard. For the moon is utterly reasonable; and the moon is the mother of lunatics and has given to them all her name."
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