tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33144236043731306242024-03-13T03:50:14.351-04:00Laughter and Humility (GK-CHESTERTON.ORG)Quotes by and posts relating to one of the most influential authors of the 20th century, G.K. ChestertonMikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.comBlogger1913125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-38742534898656798532024-01-15T16:48:00.000-05:002024-01-15T16:48:03.646-05:00"Yes," said Hood, "your expert is very expert, isn't he- in writing books?" <div><br /></div><div>Sir Samuel Bliss stiffened in all his bristles. "I trust," he said "you are not implying any doubt that our expert is an expert." </div><div><br /></div><div>"I have no doubt of your expert," answered Hood gravely, "I do not doubt either that he is expert or that he is yours."</div><div><br /></div><div>"Really, gentlemen," cried Bliss in a sort of radiance of protest, "I think such an insinuation about a man in Professor Hake's position---" </div><div><br /></div><div> "Not at all, not at all," said Hood soothingly, "I'm sure it's a most comfortable position."
<blockquote>-<i>Tales of the Long Bow</i> (1925)</blockquote>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-32151359095407852092023-10-20T21:41:00.005-04:002023-10-20T21:41:41.061-04:00A little early for Christmas, but I just came across this wonderful narration on Youtube of GKC's Christmas "ghost story" (from his book <i>Tremendous Trifles</i>), called "The Shop of Ghosts". The narration is done by Edward E. French:<Br><br></br>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/nkBlenCD4ws?si=7m-CkNNXk7I6iuil" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen></iframe>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-63858755739527966302023-06-09T06:58:00.002-04:002023-06-09T06:59:21.618-04:00EtymologyThe people who trust to derivations are always wrong: for they ignore the life and adventures of a word, and all that it has done since it was born. People of that sort would say that every man who lives in a villa is a villain. They would say that being chivalrous is the same as being horsey.
<blockquote><i>Alarms and Discursions</i> (1911) </blockquote>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-4344304288773818362023-05-07T08:20:00.002-04:002023-05-07T08:20:31.882-04:00But there is not only doubt about mystical things; not even only about moral things. There is most doubt of all about rational things. I do not mean that I feel these doubts, either rational or mystical; but I mean that a sufficient number of modern people feel them to make unanimity an absurd assumption....[T]his scepticism is throwing thousands into a condition of doubt, not about [mystical] but about obvious things. We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.
<blockquote>-August 14, 1926, <i>Illustrated London News</i></blockquote>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-77823531905410385022023-04-21T06:52:00.004-04:002023-04-21T06:52:47.428-04:00<p>[I]magination is the signal of instinct. Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling...[A]ll fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound occupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age. </p><blockquote>-April 21, 1923, <i>Illustrated London News</i></blockquote><p></p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-74618123755044175692023-04-16T12:14:00.001-04:002023-04-16T12:14:03.659-04:00<p>Every kind of bureaucratic busybody has swarmed round the poor man's house until his whole authority in it has been hollowed out and eaten away. Children cannot treat parents as authorities whom authorities treat as slaves. The consequence is that nearly the whole normal business of looking after children has passed from the parent to the policeman.
<blockquote>-March 24 1923, <i>Illustrated London News</i></blockquote>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-34675413635031640642023-03-26T08:07:00.003-04:002023-03-26T08:08:52.548-04:00Bob Dylan and GKCFrom the latest issue of <i>Gilbert</i> (March/April 2023), on p. 33, there is this interesting tidbit:
<blockquote>So, Fr. O'Conner's guidance and example as a real priest was the spark that became Chesterton's ficitional priest Father Brown, the hero of 53 mystery stories, as well as movies and television shows (the most recent of those was referenced by Bob Dylan as being "binge-worthy").</blockquote>
Unfortunately, while I have not seen the "most recent" of the television shows (other than one episode), which is produced by the BBC, from what I have heard it is not faithful to the spirit of the original stories, whatever other merits it may have. That said, to the extent it encourages people to read the originals, it is to that extent good at least. Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-1195773373136847792023-03-19T19:29:00.000-04:002023-03-19T19:29:34.124-04:00Just as it was the mark of old tyranny to stretch the law, so it will be the mark of new tyranny to make a law that can be stretched. To a great extent, at least, what used to be called common law used the language of common-sense. That is, it used words that were a little too popular to be entirely twisted out of their ordinary sense. Stealing could hardly be stretched to mean taking ten minutes of a man's time. Murder could hardly be made to include any sort of material inconvenience, that anybody might say had shortened his life. But if the law begins to deal with new scientific words, that do not as yet correspond to any popular and recognised things, we have no public protection against their being extended to touch anything or anybody.
<blockquote>-March 17, 1923, <i>Illustrated London News</i></blockquote>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-89759543253770601202023-03-13T05:51:00.001-04:002023-03-13T05:51:07.065-04:00It is always hard to make a rule about the claim of the amateur to contradict the expert. One test, which would by itself cart away a great deal of lumber, is the rule that none is a specialist outside his speciality. In magazines and such modern arenas this truism is often oddly disregarded [...] But there is yet another line along which the conclusions of the expert may lawfully be tested by the amateur. And these are the cases in which the expert actually asserts what the amateur is able from his own knowledge to deny. We are not bound to believe the Astronomer Royal when he disproves the sun in heaven; and though I may respect my doctor when he tells me I am dying, I shall differ from him if he tells me I am dead.
<blockquote>-March 2,1916, <i>New Witness</i></blockquote>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-56398128032795397172022-11-25T21:23:00.000-05:002022-11-25T21:23:01.770-05:00It is a curious irony that [...] a modern man thinks that people in the Middle Ages believed anything they were told. For in truth he only thinks it because he himself believes anything he is told about the Middle Ages. It is modern credulity that has invented mediaeval credulity.
<blockquote>-November 18, 1922, <i>Illustrated London News</i> </blockquote>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-52187849375943359892022-10-11T20:50:00.004-04:002022-10-11T20:52:01.072-04:00In the most modern politics, unfortunately, it may truly be said that those who make history never know history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
<blockquote>-<i>The End of the Armistice </i><br />(collection of essays published posthumously in 1940)</blockquote><p> </p> Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-78763017920774323082022-10-04T06:44:00.000-04:002022-10-04T06:44:50.803-04:00Perhaps a truly great thing always tries to grow small; and there is hidden here a mystery of microscopic ambition. For though the Magnificat magnifies the Lord, it is only just after the Lord has minimized Himself.
<blockquote>-<i>The Resurrection of Rome</i> (1930)</blockquote>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-81135865970540792312022-09-01T19:40:00.005-04:002022-09-18T08:03:19.543-04:00GKC in "The Sandman" Netflix series (sort of...)GKC (sort of) in "The Sandman" Netflix series, and about a minute into the clip quoting from GKC's book <a href="http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/orthodoxy/ch4.html?fbclid=IwAR3EnasEwmHXUuTNSxWql8llAyD4xD8DEPFCtEfioKkavgAG041QUWlSV84">Orthodoxy</a>:
<blockquote>"...the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power..."</blockquote>
<br /> Obviously, the character of Gilbert/Fiddler's Green is not <i>literally</i> GKC, but he was modeled on GKC (Neil Gaiman being an admirer of Chesterton). <br />
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dOPqUK2AFpI" title="YouTube video player" width="560"></iframe>
Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-40092622991177782972022-06-21T18:49:00.003-04:002022-06-21T18:49:24.226-04:00Terry Deary on GKCTerry Deary, describing the books that changed his life, the first on the list being GKC's <i>The Napoelon of Notting Hill</i><blockquote> My school texts like the Thomas Hardy we were forced to read were so dull. When I came across this Chesterton book at the age of around 17 then I realised books could be exciting and create colourful new worlds. I understood that books don’t have to be serious and filled with miserable heroes like Tess of the D’Urbervilles or the Mayor of Casterbridge. They can lead to a meeting with fantastical people. Chesterton made me a writer.</blockquote><p><a href="https://www.readersdigest.co.uk/culture/books/meet-the-author/terry-deary-books-that-changed-my-life">https://www.readersdigest.co.uk/culture/books/meet-the-author/terry-deary-books-that-changed-my-life</a></p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-7194881820210655632022-04-22T23:20:00.008-04:002022-04-24T12:23:31.297-04:00Roma Downey quoting GKCWell, OK, to speak more strictly, she actually <i>misattributed</i> a quote to GKC, it would appear. But still....<br /><br /><a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10156164832444273">https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10156164832444273</a><br /><br />J.K. Rowling also<a href="https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/568683613623087104" target="_blank"> once misattributed a quote to GKC</a> on Twitter (that someone had first misattributed to her), and ironically enough had the hashtag "#CorrectAttributionDay" :-) Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-49494544225966981692022-02-22T19:10:00.014-05:002022-02-26T07:36:50.201-05:00Charlotte Mason<span></span><a href="http://platitudesundone.blogspot.com/2022/02/charlotte-mason.html#more">Read more »</a>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-11937973361703541132022-01-22T21:24:00.004-05:002022-03-03T18:04:18.417-05:00I have reflected; and I think I see the place of the amateur.<br /><br />
The obscure things, the details and disputed points, the great scholar can always see and note better than we can. It is the obvious things that he cannot see. I do not say this in mere depreciation; I think it is really inseparable from that concentrated research to which the world owes so much. It is the truth in the traditional picture of the absent-minded professor, who remains gazing at a fossil or a Roman coin and fails to observe external objects, such as a house on fire, a revolution, an escaped elephant putting its head through the skylight, and similar things....it is precisely because I am so much less learned than he that it is my privilege to lead him through common ways, pointing out elephants and other enormous objects.
<blockquote>-<i>The Superstition of the Sceptic</i> (1925)</blockquote>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-58501343475210104002021-12-31T13:13:00.002-05:002021-12-31T13:21:12.904-05:00"The New War on Christmas"<i>G.K.'s Weekly</i>, <br>December 26, 1925<span></span><a href="http://platitudesundone.blogspot.com/2021/12/the-new-war-on-christmas.html#more">Read more »</a>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-27278082177296333562021-12-19T09:58:00.002-05:002021-12-19T09:58:14.224-05:00[To] accept the conclusions of science, it is necessary that science should conclude. And science never does conclude. It is the whole claim and boast of science that she never does conclude. To conclude means to shut up; and the very last thing the man of science is likely to do is to shut up [...] it is the whole point of science never to be in this sense final or irrevocable. Of course, this does not mean that we shall not work more wisely if we work in the light of the suggestions of science, or take note of the general tendencies of science. It only means that people who use these words ten thousand times a year have not taken note of what they are saying [...] If science had concluded, it would mean almost literally that science had shut up shop.
<blockquote>-<i>G.K.'s Weekly</i>, March 21, 1925</blockquote>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-28527175517161797452021-12-10T22:07:00.005-05:002021-12-10T22:32:24.945-05:00 "The Christmas Carol" is a kind of philanthropic dream, an enjoyable nightmare, in which the scenes shift bewilderingly and seem as miscellaneous as the pictures in a scrap-book, but in which there is one constant state of the soul, a state of rowdy benediction and a hunger for human faces. The beginning is about a winter day and a miser; yet the beginning is in no way bleak. The author starts with a kind of happy howl; he bangs on our door like a drunken carol singer; his style is festive and popular; he compares the snow and hail to philanthropists who "come down handsomely;" he compares the fog to unlimited beer. Scrooge is not really inhuman at the beginning any more than he is at the end. There is a heartiness in his inhospitable sentiments that is akin to humour and therefore to humanity; he is only a crusty old bachelor, and had (I strongly suspect) given away turkeys secretly all his life. The beauty and the real blessing of the story do not lie in the mechanical plot of it, the repentance of Scrooge, probable or improbable; they lie in the great furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him; that great furnace, the heart of Dickens. Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us. Whether or no the visions were evoked by real Spirits of the Past, Present, and Future, they were evoked by that truly exalted order of angels who are correctly called High Spirits. They are impelled and sustained by a quality which our contemporary artists ignore or almost deny, but which in a life decently lived is as normal and attainable as sleep, positive, passionate, conscious joy. The story sings from end to end like a happy man going home; and, like a happy and good man, when it cannot sing it yells. It is lyric and exclamatory, from the first exclamatory words of it. It is strictly a Christmas carol.
<blockquote>-<i>Charles Dickens</i> (1906)</blockquote>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-5142271938218187282021-11-13T16:47:00.003-05:002021-11-13T16:47:47.282-05:00An interesting find I came across today:
<blockquote>An Evening with Orson Welles is a series of six short films created in 1970 by Orson Welles, for the exclusive use of Sears, Roebuck & Co. Welles produced the recitations of popular stories for Sears's Avco Cartrivision machines, a pioneering home video system.[1]: 166 Five of the films are regarded as lost; footage from one, The Golden Honeymoon, is known to exist.</blockquote><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Evening_with_Orson_Welles">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Evening_with_Orson_Welles</a><br /><br />The reason it interests me is because one of the six short films was devoted to writings by G.K. Chesterton:<br /><br />It even has an IMDB page:<br /><br /><a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11471996/">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11471996/</a><br /><br />Now if only it wasn't lost....<br /><br />Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-73382930284655011562021-10-17T20:39:00.000-04:002021-10-17T20:39:14.700-04:00<p>[Mr. Edison] then goes on to deal with the origin of life; or rather, not to deal with it. The following statement is of such fearful intensity and importance that the interviewer prints it all in italics, and I will so reproduce it. <i>"I believe the form of energy that we call life came to the earth from some other planet or at any rate from somewhere out in the great spaces beyond us.</i>" In short, there will henceforth be branded upon our brains the conviction that life came from somewhere, and probably under some conditions of space. But the suggestion that it came from another planet seems a rather weak evasion. Even a mind enfeebled by popular science would be capable of stirring faintly at that, and feeling unsatisfied. If it came from another planet, how did it arise on that planet? And in whatever way it arose on that planet, why could it not arise in that way on this planet? We are dealing with something admittedly unique and mysterious: like a ghost. The original rising of life from the lifeless is as strange as a rising from the dead. But this is like explaining a ghost walking visibly in the churchyard, by saying that it must have come from the churchyard of another village.
</p><blockquote>-May 3, 1924, <i>Illustrated London News</i></blockquote><p></p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-83945546489108362842021-09-12T07:32:00.003-04:002021-09-12T07:33:40.255-04:00<p>Now here we find ourselves confronted with an amazing fact. When, in the past, opinions so arguable have been enforced by State violence, it has been at the instigation of fanatics who held them for fixed and flaming certainties. If truths could not be evaded by their enemies, neither could they be altered even by their friends. But what are the certain truths that the secular arm must now lift the sword to enforce? Why, they are that very mass of bottomless questions and bewildered answers that we have been studying in the last chapters --- questions whose only interest is that they are trackless and mysterious; answers whose only glory is that they are tentative and new. The devotee boasted that he would never abandon the faith; and therefore he persecuted for the faith. But the doctor of science actually boasts that he will always abandon a hypothesis; and yet he persecutes for the hypothesis. The Inquisitor violently enforced his creed, because it was unchangeable. The <i>savant</i> enforces it violently because he may change it the next day.</p><p>Now this is a new sort of persecution; and one may be permitted to ask if it is an improvement on the old. The difference, so far as one can see at first, seems rather favourable to the old. If we are to be at the merciless mercy of man, most of us would rather be racked for a creed that existed intensely in somebody's head, rather than vivisected for a discovery that had not yet come into anyone's head, and possibly never would. A man would rather be tortured with a thumbscrew until he chose to see reason than tortured with a vivisecting knife until the vivisector chose to see reason. Yet that is the real difference between the two types of legal enforcement. If I give in to the Inquisitors, I should at least know what creed to profess. But even if I yelled out a <i>credo</i> when the Eugenists had me on the rack, I should not know what creed to yell. I might get an extra turn of the rack for confessing to the creed they confessed quite a week ago.</p>
<blockquote>-<i>Eugenics and Other Evils</i> (1922)</blockquote><p> </p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-5709546862252299762021-08-16T00:16:00.003-04:002021-08-16T00:16:56.516-04:00<p>The principle which dictates that things said of a man immediately after his death shall be as gentle as is possible is a human and a highly intelligible principle. It rests first upon this; that almost every man leaving the world creates an agony in individual affections, the intensity of which is greater even than that of patriotic anger; it rests secondly on this; that every man dying is going where he may be understood for the first time. To put the matter briefly, we speak as well as may be of a dead man, for two reasons. The first is that some men knew him; the second is that no man knew him.
</p><blockquote>-July 21, 1906, <i>Daily News</i></blockquote><p></p>Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3314423604373130624.post-66799916810997645542021-08-12T17:28:00.000-04:002021-08-12T17:28:05.759-04:00The intrinsic and terrible peril of the present tendency is that it is not, even in theory, the growth of great things; it is only the growth of small things until they are in fact big. A power which is, in practice, like the central power of government, will be given to something that is not a central government, but only a centralized business. When it exists, it will be exactly like Socialism in being uniform, universal, official, oppressive.<br /><blockquote>-<i>G.K.'s Weekly</i>, March 24, 1928</blockquote>
[Found in July/August 2021 issue of <i>Gilbert!</i>]Mikehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00108843791322871067noreply@blogger.com0