The Man Who Knew Too Much

by G.K. Chesterton

"I know too much," he said. "That's what's the matter with me. That's what's the matter with all of us, and the whole show; we know too much. Too much about one another; too much about ourselves. That's why I'm really interested, just now, about one thing that I don't know."

Such people seldom reject anything nonsensical, for they are always seeking for something new.

They had all that forgetfulness of history that goes everywhere with the extension of education.

Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.

They told me I must put on fancy dress; so I did put on fancy dress, according to my own taste and fancy. I put on the only costume I think fit for a man who has inherited the position of a gentleman, and yet has not entirely lost the feelings of one." In answer to a look of inquiry, he rose with a sweeping and downward gesture. "Sackcloth," he said; "and I would wear the ashes as well if they would stay on my bald head."

It startled the well informed by being a new and fantastic idea they had never encountered. It startled the ignorant by being an old and familiar idea they never thought to have seen revived. Men saw things in a new light, and knew not even whether it was the sunset or the dawn.

"I have been in that room ever since," said Horne Fisher. "I am in it now. I won the election, but I never went to the House. My life has been a life in that little room on that lonely island. Plenty of books and cigars and luxuries, plenty of knowledge and interest and information, but never a voice out of that tomb to reach the world outside. I shall probably die there." And he smiled as he looked across the vast green park to the gray horizon.

Believe me, you never know the best about men till you know the worst about them.

God alone knows what the conscience can survive, or how a man who has lost his honor will still try to save his soul."

But I want you to be with me; for I rather think it is my hour."

"It was a fantastic coincidence," reflected Horne Fisher. "It's extraordinary what coincidences do sometimes occur. By the oddest chance in the world, by one chance in a million, it so happened that another sword of exactly the same shape was in the same garden at the same time.

"We must walk the rest of the way," he said, "and the last bit of all I must walk alone."

March thought suddenly of the signs of the last days and knew he was looking at the apocalyptic meteor of something like a Day of judgment.

and the man who knew too much knew what is worth knowing.