The Everlasting Man (Complete and Unabridged) (Rediscovered Books): With linked Table of Contents

by G.K. Chesterton

This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature.

The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes.

We come back once more to the simple truth; that at sometime too early for these critics to trace, a transition had occurred to which bones and stones cannot in their nature bear witness; and man became a living soul.

we are not of those who begin by invoking a divine Trinity, we must none the less invoke a human Trinity; and see that triangle repeated everywhere in the pattern of the world.

Those who have fallen may

remember the fall, even when they forget the height.

But exactly what it lost by these larger ideas is the largest idea of all. It is the idea of the fatherhood that makes the whole world one.

Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.

But the point of the puzzle is this, that all this vagueness and variation arise from the fact that the whole thing began in fancy and in dreaming; and that there are no rules of architecture

for

a castle in the...

The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There

The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things. The posture

If man cannot pray he is gagged;

In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing a most hungry sincerity in the idea of seeking for a place

with

most dark and deep and mysterious levity about all ...

Nobody who reads even a few lines of Virgil can doubt that he understood what moral sanity means to mankind.

it was not so much immoral as irresponsible; it had no foresight of the final test of time.

Atheism became really possible in that abnormal time; for atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul;

the sense that there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees.

as they saw all the best work of humanity sinking slowly and helplessly into a swamp. They could easily believe that even creation itself was not a creation but a perpetual fall, when they saw that the weightiest and worthiest of all human creations was falling by its own weight. They could fancy that all the stars were falling stars; and that the very pillars of their own solemn porticos were bowed under a sort of gradual deluge. To men in that mood there was a reason for atheism that is in some sense reasonable. Mythology might fade and philosophy might stiffen; but if behind these things there was a reality, surely that reality might have sustained things as they sank. There was no God; if there had been a God, surely this was the very moment when He would have moved and saved the world. The

would be vain to attempt to say anything adequate, or anything new, about the change which this conception of a deity born like an outcast or even an outlaw had upon the whole conception of law and its duties to the poor and outcast.

It was a place of dreams come true.

They were those who sought not tales but the truth of things, and since their thirst for truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had their reward.

Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realise that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.

There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world; of shaking the towers and palaces from below; even as Herod the great king felt that earthquake under him and swayed with his swaying palace.

the ordeal of the free man.

Every short story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgement.

It met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.

answer for millions of others in my reply; because it fits

the lock, because it is like life. It is one among many stories; only

it happens to be a tr...

It is one among many philosophies; only it happens...

The Faith is always converting the age, not as an old religion but as a new religion.

Again and again, before our time, men have grown content with a diluted doctrine. And again and again there has followed on that dilution, coming as out of the darkness in a crimson cataract, the strength of the red original wine.