An extraordinary idea has arisen that the best critic of religious institutions is the man who talks coldly about Religion. Nobody supposes that the best critic of music is the man who talks coldly about music. Within reasonable bounds, the more excited the musician is about music, the more he is likely to be right about it. Nobody thinks a man a correct judge of poetry because he looks down on poems. But there is an idea that a man is a correct judge of religion because he looks down on religions. Now folklore and primitive faiths, and all such things are of the nature of music and poetry in this respect- that the actual language and symbols they employ require not only an understanding, they require what the Bible very finely calls an understanding heart. You must be a little moved in your emotions even to understand them at all; you must have a heart in order to make head or tail of them. Consequently, whenever I hear on these occasions that beliefs are being discussed scientifically and calmly, I know that they are being discussed wrong. Even a false religion is too genuine a thing to be discussed calmly.

-October 17, 1908, Illustrated London News

On 15 July 1903 Lady Anne Ritchie, the eldest daughter of Thackeray, [author of Vanity Fair] wrote to Chesterton to say that she was 'much interested' by his book [on Robert Browning], 'which recalls dear Mr Browning so vividly to me', indeed 'instantaneously more vividly than my remembrances of him'.

-G.K. Chesterton: A Biography, Ian Ker (Oxford University Press, 2011)

Terry Pratchett on GKC

Some excerpts from a recent interview with Terry Pratchett in the New York Times Book Review

(H/T All Manner of Thing )

Sell us on your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer. 

G. K. Chesterton. These days recognized — that is if he is recognized at all — as the man who wrote the Father Brown stories. My grandmother actually knew him quite well and pointed out that she herself lived on Chesterton Green in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, here in the U.K. And the man was so well venerated that on one memorable occasion, he was late in sending a piece to The Strand Magazine and a railway train actually waited at the local station until Mr. Chesterton had finished writing his piece. When she told me that, I thought, Blimey, now that is celebrity.

[...] If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? And the prime minister? 

Well, it would have to be "The Man Who Was Thursday." It’s a damn good read that I believe should be read by everyone in politics.

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited? 

Mark Twain, G. K. Chesterton and Neil Gaiman, because he’s a mate who knows how to order the most excellent sushi.

At the beginning and at the end of all life, learned and ignorant, there is the abiding truth, that in the inmost theatre of the soul of man, with a scenery of bottomless infinities and appalling abstractions, there is always going forward one ancient mystery-play, in which there are only two characters.

-Feburary 9, 1901, The Speaker