Mommy Life: G. K. Chesterton quotes

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October 15, 2011 9:05 AM

G. K. Chesterton quotes

Faithful Families is the name of the column I write each week at St. Francis deSales in Purcellville. You can find them archived at the parish website. And if you are interested in having your church pick up my column, email me.

Here is last week's:

Chesterton Treasures

I'm on a campaign to read more G. K. Chesterton. Next on my list is Brave New Family: G.K. Chesterton on Men and Women, Children, Sex, Divorce, Marriage and the Family.

Chesterton (1874-1936) was a great English thinker whose writing included philosophy, poetry, plays, journalism, public lectures and debates, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction.

He converted to Catholicism when he was 48 years old - surporising himself more than anyone else. In The Catholic Church and Conversion, he wrote, "I had no more idea of becoming a Catholic than of becoming a cannibal." As a 20-year evangelical convert, I identify with that.

Here are a few Chesterton nuggets to whet your appetite too:

• A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

• A room without books is like a body without a soul.

• War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.

• There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.

• Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

• Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

• Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

• No man knows he is young while he is young.

• The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

• The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

• The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.
• The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

• How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

• Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution

• I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

• I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.

• It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

• The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.

• When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.