Heretics (1905) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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People edit see section history

• Rudyard Kipling: A militaristic writer, whose main heresy was his detachment from and lack of loyalty to any specific locality.
• George Bernard Shaw: A writer and playwright, whose main heresy was his ungratefulness for reality. Shaw was Chesterton's friend and arch-rival.
• H.G. Wells: Author of numerous science-fiction novels, whose main heresy was his failure to recognize the objective ideals by which their imperfect expressions are judged.
• Omar Khayyam: An Eastern poet, author of the Rubaiyat, whose main heresy was his pessimistic attitude toward life and drinking.
• George Moore: A Victorian memoirist whose main heresy was his inability to talk of any subject except through the lens of his own thoughts.
• Lowes Dickinson: A writer interested in Paganism, whose main heresy was his tendency to ignore the vital spiritual discoveries that mankind has made since discarding Paganism.
• Joseph McCabe: A writer whose main heresy was his refusal to grant paradox and humor any place in sincere and important discussions.
• James Whistler: An American artist, whose main heresy was his inability to be anything except for an artist.

Quotes edit see section history

• “Emancipation has only locked the saint in the same tower of silence as the heresiarch.”

• “I revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general hope of getting something done.”

• “…this omission of a standard of good does leave us face to face with the problem of a human consciousness filled with very definite images of evil, and with no definite images of good. To us light must be henceforward the dark thing -- the thing of which we cannot speak….The human race, according to religion, fell once, and in falling gained the knowledge of good and evil. Now we have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us.”

• “As enunciated today ‘progress’ is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative….We meet every ideal of religion, patriotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of progress -- that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a good deal more of nobody knows what. Progress, properly understood, has, indeed, a most dignified and legitimate meaning. But as used in opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous.”

• “There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”

• “We might, no doubt, find it a nuisance to count all the blades of grass or all the leaves of the trees; but this would not be because of our boldness or gaiety, but because of our lack of boldness and gaiety. The bore would go onward, bold and gay, and find the blades of grass as splendid as the swords of an army. The bore is stronger and more joyous than we are; he is a demigod -- nay, he is a god. For it is the gods who do not tire of the iteration of things; to them the nightfall is always new, and the last rose as red as the first.”

• “Posting a letter and getting married are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic a thing must be irrevocable.”

• “The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always breathing an air of locality. London is a place, to be compared to Chicago; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuktu. But Timbuktu is not a place, since there, at least, live men who regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the winds of the world. The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men — diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern Britons. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men — hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky.”

• “A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong that he feels more.”

• “The strong old literature is all in praise of the weak. The rude old tales are as tender to minorities as any modern political idealist. The rude old ballads are as sentimentally concerned for the under-dog as the Aborigines Protection Society. When men were tough and raw, when they lived amid hard knocks and hard laws, when they knew what fighting really was, they had only two kinds of songs. The first was a rejoicing that the weak had conquered the strong, the second a lamentation that the strong had, for once in a way, conquered the weak. For this defiance of the status quo, this constant effort to alter the existing balance, this premature challenge to the powerful, is the whole nature and inmost secret of the psychological adventure which is called man. It is his strength to disdain strength. The forlorn hope is not only a real hope, it is the only real hope of mankind.”

• “Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.”

• “Science can analyse a pork-chop, and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; but science cannot analyse any man’s wish for a pork-chop, and say how much of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a haunting love of the beautiful. The man’s desire for the pork-chop remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven. All attempts, therefore, at a science of any human things, at a science of history, a science of folk-lore, a science of sociology, are by their nature not merely hopeless, but crazy.”

• “Possibly the most pathetic of all the delusions of the modern students of primitive belief is the notion they have about the thing they call anthropomorphism. They believe that primitive men attributed phenomena to a god in human form in order to explain them, because his mind in its sullen limitation could not reach any further than his own clownish existence....men pictured something semi-human at the back of all things, not because such a thought was natural, but because it was supernatural; not because it made things more comprehensible, but because it made them a hundred times more incomprehensible and mysterious....When a tree really looks like a man our knees knock under us. And when the whole universe looks like a man we fall on our faces.”

• “The term ‘pagan’ is continually used in fiction and light literature as meaning a man without any religion, whereas a pagan was generally a man with about half a dozen. The pagans, according to this notion, were continually crowning themselves with flowers and dancing about in an irresponsible state, whereas, if there were two things that the best pagan civilization did honestly believe in, they were a rather too rigid dignity and a much too rigid responsibility. Pagans are depicted as above all things inebriate and lawless, whereas they were above all things reasonable and respectable. They are praised as disobedient when they had only one great virtue — civic obedience. They are envied and admired as shamelessly happy when they had only one great sin — despair.”

• “Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.”

• “It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them.”

• “The poet reads into the story of Ulysses the conception of an incurable desire to wander. But the real Ulysses does not desire to wander at all. He desires to get home. He displays his heroic and unconquerable qualities in resisting the misfortunes which baulk him; but that is all. There is no love of adventure for its own sake; that is a Christian product.”

• “I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking. Progress is obviously the antithesis of independent thinking. For under independent or individualistic thinking, every man starts at the beginning, and goes, in all probability, just as far as his father before him. But if there really be anything of the nature of progress, it must mean, above all things, the careful study and assumption of the whole of the past.”

• “Of course, union is no more a good thing in itself than separation is a good thing in itself. To have a party in favour of union and a party in favour of separation is as absurd as to have a party in favour of going upstairs and a party in favour of going downstairs. The question is not whether we go up or down stairs, but where we are going to, and what we are going, for? Union is strength; union is also weakness. It is a good thing to harness two horses to a cart; but it is not a good thing to try and turn two hansom cabs into one four-wheeler….The question in all cases is not a question of union or absence of union, but of identity or absence of identity.”

• “Democracy is not philanthropy; it is not even altruism or social reform. Democracy is not founded on pity for the common man; democracy is founded on reverence for the common man, or, if you will, even on fear of him. It does not champion man because man is so miserable, but because man is so sublime. It does not object so much to the ordinary man being a slave as to his not being a king, for its dream is always the dream of the first Roman republic, a nation of kings.”

• “The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty.”

• “It may be thought ‘dogmatic,’ for instance, in some circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. But it is not thought ‘dogmatic’ to assume the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a rationalistic point of view quite as improbable.”

• “I apologize to the rationalists even for calling them rationalists. There are no rationalists. We all believe fairy-tales, and live in them.”

• “The more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything.”

• “Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.”

• “Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised.”

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. G. K. Chesterton (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 100

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Religion & Spirituality › Authors, A-Z › ( C ) › Chesterton, G. K.
• Books › Nonfiction › Philosophy › Religious

More Books Like This edit see section history