What is wrong with [the new theological literature] is not that it professes to state the paradox of God, but that it professes to state the paradox of God as a truism. You may or may not be able to reveal the divine secret; but at least you cannot let it leak out. If ever it comes, it will be unmistakable, it will kill or cure. Judaism, with its dark sublimity, said that if a man saw God he would die. Christianity conjectures that (by an even more catastrophic fatality) if he sees God he will live for ever. But whatever happens will be something decisive and indubitable. A man after seeing God may die; but at least he will not be slightly unwell, and then have to take a little medicine and then have to call in a doctor. If any of us ever do read the riddle, we shall read it in brutal black and blazing white, exactly as we do read the riddle of some sixpenny mystery of murder. If we ever do find the solution, we shall know that it is the right solution.

-The Common Man (1950)

When the soul really wakes it always deals directly with the nearest things. If, let us say, a man woke up in bed from a celestial dream which told him to go on painting till all was blue, he would begin by painting himself blue, then his bed blue, and so on. But he would be using all the machinery that came to hand; and that is exactly what always happens in real spiritual revolutions. They work by their environment even when they alter it.

Thus, when professors tell us that the Christians “borrowed” this or that fable or monster from the heathens, it is as if people said that a bricklayer had “borrowed” his bricks from clay, or a chemist had “borrowed” his explosives from chemicals; or that the Gothic builders of Lincoln or Beauvais had “borrowed” the pointed arch from the thin lattices of the Moors. Perhaps they did borrow it, but (by heaven!) they paid it back.

-The Common Man (1950)

There is no better test of a man's ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong.

-The Common Man (1950)

Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making the truth the test.  It is not pride to wish to do well, or even to look well, according to a real test.  It is pride to think that a thing looks ill, because it does not look like something characteristic of oneself.  Now in the general clouding of clear and abstract standards, there is a real tendency today for a young man (and even possibly a young woman) to fall back on that personal test, simply for lack of any trustworthy impersonal test.  No standard being sufficiently secure for the self to be moulded to suit it, all standards may be moulded to suit the self.  But the self as a self is a very small thing and something very like an accident.  Hence arises a new kind of narrowness; which exists especially in those who boast of breadth.  The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all. 

-The Common Man (1950)

[..] a stiff apology is a second insult [...] the injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

-The Common Man (1950)

"Deeds, not words" is itself an excellent example of "Words, not thoughts". It is a deed that throws a pebble into a pond and a word that sends a prisoner to the gallows.

-The Common Man (1950)

But if ever there was a whisper that might truly come from the devil, it is the suggestion that men can despise the beautiful things they have got, and only delight in getting new things because they have not got them. It is obvious that, on that principle, Adam will tire of the tree just as he has tired of the garden. "It is enough that there is always a beyond"; that is, there is always something else to get tired of. All progress based on that mood is truly a Fall; man did fall, does fall, and we can today see him falling. It is the great progressive proposition; that he must seek only for enjoyment because he has lost the power to enjoy.

-The Common Man (1950)

A self-conscious simplicity may well be far more intrinsically ornate than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal of the pomp and sumptuousness of the world’s history was simple in the truest sense.  It was born of an almost babyish receptiveness; it was the work of men who had eyes to wonder and men who had ears to hear.

-The Common Man (1950)

There has arisen in our time an extraordinary notion that there is something humane, open-hearted or generous about refusing to define one’s creed.  Obviously the very opposite is the truth.  Refusing to define a creed is not only not generous, it is distinctly mean.  It fails in frankness and fraternity towards the enemy.  It is fighting without a flag or a declaration of war.  It denies to the enemy the decent concessions of battle; the right to know the policy and to treat with the headquarters.  Modern “broad-mindedness” has a quality that can only be called sneakish; it endeavours to win without giving itself away, even after it has won.  It desires to be victorious without betraying even the name of the victor.  For all sane men have intellectual doctrines and fighting theories; and if they will not put them on the table, it can only be because they wish to have the advantage of a fighting theory which cannot be fought.

In the things of conviction there is only one other thing besides a dogma, and that is a prejudice.  If there is something in your life for which you will hold meetings and agitate and write letters to the newspaper, but for which you will not find the plain terms of a creed, then that thing is properly to be described as a prejudice, however new or noble or advanced it may seem to be.

-The Common Man (1950)

A perfect description of most political debates these days...

There is one little habit of some of the most intelligent modern writers against which I should like to protest. It consists of flatly refusing to state somebody else's opinion as it stands; and consider it on its own merits. The modern writer must always assume that it is a choice between his own extreme opinion and something at the other extreme.

-The Common Man (1950)

The advantage of an elementary philosophic habit is that it permits a man, for instance, to understand a statement like this, “Whether there can or can not be exceptions to a process depends on the nature of that process.” The disadvantage of not having it is that a man will turn impatiently even from so simple a truism; and call it metaphysical gibberish.  He will then go off and say: “One can’t have such things in the twentieth century”; which really is gibberish.  Yet the former statement could surely be explained to him in sufficiently simple terms.  If a man sees a river run downhill day after day and year after year, he is justified in reckoning, we might say in betting, that it will do so till he dies.  But he is not justified in saying that it cannot run uphill, until he really knows why it runs downhill.  To say it does so by gravitation answers the physical but not the philosophical question.  It only repeats that there is a repetition; it does not touch the deeper question of whether that repetition could be altered by anything outside it.  And that depends on whether there is anything outside it.  For instance, suppose that a man had only seen the river in a dream.  He might have seen it in a hundred dreams, always repeating itself and always running downhill.  But that would not prevent the hundredth dream being different and the river climbing the mountain; because the dream is a dream, and there is something outside it.  Mere repetition does not prove reality or inevitability.  We must know the nature of the thing and the cause of the repetition.  If the nature of the thing is a Creation, and the cause of the thing a Creator, in other words if the repetition itself is only the repetition of something willed by a person, then it is not impossible for the same person to will a different thing.  If a man is a fool for believing in a Creator, then he is a fool for believing in a miracle; but not otherwise.  Otherwise, he is simply a philosopher who is consistent in his philosophy.

A modern man is quite free to choose either philosophy.  But what is actually the matter with the modern man is that he does not know even his own philosophy; but only his own phraseology.  He can only answer the next spiritual message produced by a spiritualist, or the next cure attested by doctors at Lourdes, by repeating what are generally nothing but phrases; or are, at their best, prejudices.

-The Common Man (1950)

Vandalism is of two kinds, the negative and the positive; as in the Vandals of the ancient world, who destroyed buildings, and the Vandals of the modern world who erect them.

-The Common Man (1950)

[...] the prigs are now too bored even to go on with their normal routine about the Common Man; the familiar routine of oppressing him in practice and adoring him in theory.

-The Common Man (1950)

Now, in spite of the wildest claims to independence, the intellectual life of today still strikes me as being mainly symbolised by the train or the track or the groove.  There is any amount of fuss and vivacity about certain fixed fashions or directions of thought; just as there is any amount of rapidity along the fixed rails of the railway-track.  But if we begin to think about really getting off the track, we shall find that what is true of the train is equally true of the truth.  We shall find it is actually harder to get out of the groove, when the train is going fast, than when the train is going slowly.  We shall find that rapidity is rigidity; that the very fact of some social or political or artistic movement going quicker and quicker means that fewer people have the courage to move against it.  And at last perhaps nobody will make a leap for real intellectual liberty, just as nobody will jump out of a railway-train going at eighty miles an hour.  This seems to me the primary mark of what we call progressive thought in the modern world.  It is in the most exact sense of the term limited.  It is all in one dimension.  It is all in one direction.  It is limited by its progress.  It is limited by its speed.

 I have said that it has not the curiosity to stop.  If the train-dwellers were really travellers, exploring a strange country to make discoveries, they would always be stopping at little wayside stations.  For instance, they would always be stopping to consider the curious nature of their own conventional terms; a thing which they never do, by any chance.  Their catchwords are regarded solely as gadgets or appliances for getting them where they are going to; they never cast back a thought upon where the catchword comes from.  Yet that is exactly what they would do if they were really thinking, in any thorough and all-round sense.  Of course it will be understood, touching these intellectual fashions, that great masses, probably the mass of mankind, never travel on the train at all.  They remain in their villages and are much happier and better; but they are not regarded as the intellectual leaders of the time.  What I complain of is that the intellectual leaders can only lead along one narrow track; otherwise known as the ringing groove of change.

-The Common Man (collection of essays published posthumously in 1950)

The highest use of the great masters of literature is not literary; it is apart from their superb style and even from their emotional inspiration.  The first use of good literature is that it prevents a man from being merely modern.  To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one’s last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned.  The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns.  Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone.

-The Common Man (1950)

(H/T G.K. Chesterton Facebook page

It is obvious enough that whitewashing a man is quite the opposite of washing him white.  The curious thing is that people often try to whitewash a man, and fail, when it might be possible to wash him, and to some limited extent, succeed.  The real story, if the culprit only had the courage to tell it, would often be much more human and pardonable than the stiff suspicious fiction that he tells instead.  Many a public man, I fancy, has tried to conceal the crime and only succeeded in concealing the excuse [. . .] If we had the key of their souls we might come upon virtues quite unexpected — or at least upon vices more generous.  In many a complex human scandal, I fancy, the first real slander is the acquittal.

-The Common Man (1950)

You can find all the new ideas in the old books; only there you will find them balanced, kept in their place, and sometimes contradicted and overcome by other and better ideas. The great writers did not neglect a fad because they had not thought of it, but because they had thought of it and of all the answers to it as well.

-The Common Man (collection of essays published posthumously in 1950)

"It is when it comes to being broadminded that they are most narrow..."

We often lament that the world is divided into sects, all with different narrow ideas. The real trouble is that they all have different broad ideas. It is when it comes to being broadminded that they are most narrow, or at any rate most different. It is their generalisations that cut across each other... A modern agnostic thinks he is broadminded when he says that all religions or revelations, Catholic or Protestant, savage or civilised, are alike mere myths and guesses at what man can never know. But I think that is a narrow negation, sprung from special spiritual conditions in Upper Tooting. My idea of broadmindedness is to sympathise with so many of these separate spiritual atmospheres as possible; to respect or love the Buddhists of Tibet or the agnostics of Tooting for their many real virtues and capacities, but to have a philosophy which explains each of them in turn and does not merely generalise from one of them. This I have found in the Catholic philosophy; but that is not the question here, except in so far as there is, I think, just this difference: that the largeness of the other schemes is an unreal largeness of generalisation, whereas the largeness of our scheme is a real largeness of experience.

-The Common Man (collection of essays published posthumously in 1950)

"The world may learn by its mistakes; but they are mostly the mistakes of the learned."

It is true, in a sense, to say that the mob has always been led by more educated men.  It is much more true, in every sense, to say that it has always been misled by educated men.  It is easy enough to say the cultured man should be the crowd’s guide, philosopher and friend.  Unfortunately, he has nearly always been a misguiding guide, a false friend and a very shallow philosopher.  And the actual catastrophes we have suffered, including those we are now suffering, have not in historical fact been due to the prosaic practical people who are supposed to know nothing, but almost invariably to the highly theoretical people who knew that they knew everything.  The world may learn by its mistakes; but they are mostly the mistakes of the learned.

-The Common Man (collection of essays published posthumously in 1950)

Human beings are happy so long as they retain the receptive power and the power of reaction in surprise and gratitude to something outside. So long as they have this they have as the greatest minds have always declared, a something that is present in childhood and which can still preserve and invigorate manhood. The moment the self within is consciously felt as something superior to any of the gifts that can be brought to it, or any of the adventures that it may enjoy, there has appeared a sort of self-devouring fastidiousness and a disenchantment in advance, which fulfils all the Tartarean emblems of thirst and of despair.

-The Common Man (collection of essays published posthumously in 1950)