As I Was Saying Quotes

“Rituals and festivals, like those of a great national or international wedding-day, contain a thousand things to remind us that our countrymen inherit an experience much more lively and complex than any such local and temporary solution; and warn us against allowing the present to become more narrow than the past.”
― G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“To lose the sense of repugnance from one thing, or regard for another, is exactly so far as it goes to relapse into the vegetation or to return to the dust.”
― G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“But Voltaire, even at his best, really began that modern mood that has blighted all the humanitarianism he honestly supported. He started the horrible habit of helping human beings only through pitying them, and never through respecting them. Through him the oppression of the poor became a sort of cruelty to animals, and the loss of all that mystical sense that to wrong the image of God is to insult the ambassador of a King.”
― G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense that they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an eternal protest against the vulgarity of utilitarianism.”
― G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“For in truth I believe that the only way to say anything definite is to define it, and all definition is by limitation and exclusion; and that the only way to say something distinct is to say something indistinguishable from everything else. In short, I think that a man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.”
― G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader