G.K. Chesterton Quotes

“Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall enjoy everything.” It”
― Dale Ahlquist, G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense

“The snobs of the world avoid words of one syllable because they avoid common sense, plain words, clear thinking. They prefer long words, which are a substitute for thinking.”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Apostle of Common Sense

“Why should your conscience be any more reliable than your rotting teeth or your quite special defect of eyesight?”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Apostle of Common Sense

“Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded.”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Apostle of Common Sense

“something that is in the very nature of nature-worship. We can already see men becoming unhealthy by the worship of health; becoming hateful by the worship of love; becoming paradoxically solemn and overstrained even by the idolatry of sport; and in some cases strangely morbid and infected with horrors by the perversion of a just sympathy with animals. . . . There”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Apostle of Common Sense

“When Chesterton says we must not trust humanity, he especially reminds us not to put too much trust in politics or in whatever political party we pick. We generally expect too much from political parties, but none of them is based on any permanent philosophy, and, because of that, at some point they will conflict with faith.”
― Dale Ahlquist, G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense

“question of whether we particularly want to go there. An Englishman can communicate with Manhattan by wireless, and he may yet communicate with Mars by more wireless; and, in both cases, nothing remains but the deeper and darker problem of thinking of something to say.”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Apostle of Common Sense

“An open mind is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth.3 The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Apostle of Common Sense

“We have reinforced this limited choice by putting socialism in our left hand and capitalism in our right hand, leaving no other hands. The”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Apostle of Common Sense

“We are no longer very sophisticated thinkers or very precise thinkers. We deal in moods and emotions, especially in the arts, and we have developed a very loose vocabulary along with our loose thinking.”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Apostle of Common Sense

“improvement over the older Catholic idea? Chesterton says that modern thinkers will not follow new ideas to their logical end; nor will they trace traditional ideas back to their beginnings. If”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Apostle of Common Sense

“wrong. . . .[Some] people merely take the modern mood . . . and then require any creed to be cut down to fit that mood. But”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Apostle of Common Sense

“we rush madly forward toward we know not what and call ourselves “progressive”. It”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Apostle of Common Sense

“Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some . . . philosophy or religion, he is . . . becoming more and more human. When”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Apostle of Common Sense

“Changing the theology, changing the rules, does not bring freedom. Only truth brings freedom. And”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Apostle of Common Sense

“An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. . . . What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age.”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Apostle of Common Sense