Alarms and Discursions Quotes

“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it nasty.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“Christianity was beauty created by controlling a million monsters of ugliness . . . modern art and science practically mean having the million monsters and being unable to control them...”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions

“Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in the world…the division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not offer it lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of earnest reflection and research.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions