tail-feathers reblogged
On giving thanks: “You say grace before meals. But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.” - G. K. Chesterton
Wisdom for your Black Friday
tail-feathers reblogged
tail-feathers reblogged
“The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist’s world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane.”
—
G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy
A Service of
Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the [Oriental] courage, which is a disdain of life.
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
tail-feathers reblogged
"I know that weeds shall grow in it
Faster than men can burn;
And though they scatter now and go,
In some far century, sad and slow,
I have a vision, and I know
The heathen shall return.
"They shall not come with warships,
They shall not waste with brands,
But books be all their eating,
And ink be on their hands.
Chesterton- The Ballad of the White Horse
tail-feathers reblogged
“There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude.”
— G.K. Chesterton: Chaucer
tail-feathers reblogged
The way I keep in touch with the world is very gingerly, because the world touches too hard.
- Don Van Vliet
“ Joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live.”
... G.K. Chesterton
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“A turkey is more occult and awful than all the angels and archangels. In so far as God has partly revealed to us an angelic world, he has partly told us what an angel means. But God has never told us what a turkey means. And if you go and stare at a live turkey for an hour or two, you will find by the end of it that the enigma has rather increased than diminished.”__G.K. Chesterton
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“The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture which he now most commonly quotes is, ‘The kingdom of heaven is within you.’”
— G.K. Chesterton: What I Saw in America
tail-feathers reblogged
@ Sebastião Salgado
“We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.”__Gilbert K. Chesterton
tail-feathers reblogged
“I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.”
— G.K. Chesterton
“The very first fact about the sexes is they like each other.”
- G.K. Chesterton
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“Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
— G.K. Chesterton
tail-feathers reblogged
“I think it is not unlikely that in any case a simpler social life will return; even if it return by the road of ruin.”
— G.K. Chesterton
tail-feathers reblogged
St. Clare of Assisi in meditation Léon François Bénouville—1854
“No friend of what is called the emancipation of women will regret the revolt of St. Clare. She did most truly, in the modern jargon, live her own life, the life that she herself wanted to lead, as distinct from the life into which parental commands and conventional arrangements would have forced her. She became the foundress of a great feminine movement which still profoundly affects the world; and her place is with the powerful women of history.”
...G.K. Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi