G. K. Chesterton
Chronology
| 29 May 1874 | Unitarian upbringing. | |
| Anglican period. | ||
| 30 July 1922 | 48 | |
| Married Frances Blogg. | ||
| 14 June 1936 | 62 |
Grace
You say grace before meals. All right.
But I say grace before the play and the opera,
and grace before the concert 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.
Bibliography
The Works of G. K. Chesterton
Chesterton, G.K. (2009-05-13). The Works of G. K. Chesterton (36 Books with active table of contents) (Kindle Locations 29-51). DD Books. Kindle Edition.
Father Brown
- The Innocence of Father Brown
- The Wisdom of Father Brown
Novels
- The Ball and the Cross
- The Barbarism of Berlin
- The Club of Queer Trades
- The Flying Inn
- Magic
- Manalive
- The Man Who Was Thursday
- The Napoleon of Notting Hill
- The Trees of Pride
Non-Fiction
- Alarms and Discursions
- Appreciations and Criticism
- All Things Considered
- The Appetite of Tyranny
- The Crimes of England
- Eugenics and Other Evils
- Heretics
- Irish Impressions
- A Miscellany of Men
- The New Jerusalem
- Orthodoxy
- A Short History of England
- The Superstition of Divorce
- Tremendous Trifles
- Twelve Types
- Utopia of Usurers
- Varied Types
- The Victorian Age in Literature
- What I Saw in America
- What's Wrong With the World
Biographies
- Lord Kitchener
- Robert Browning
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- Shaw
Other works
- The Catholic Church and Conversion
Quotations
- A holiday is a holy day, a word that will always answer the ignorant slander which [says] that religion was opposed to human cheerfulness, and will always assert that when a day is holy, it should also be happy; a restoring thing that, by a blast of magic, turns man into himself (The Universe According to G. K. Chesterton, 54-55).
- Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
- Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
- Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all of its conquerors
- If there were no God, there would be no atheists (Where All Roads Lead, 1922).
- Sex is an instinct that produces an institution; and it is positive and not negative, noble and not base, creative and not destructive, because it produces this institution. That institution is the family; a small state or commonwealth which has hundreds of aspects, when it is once started, that are not sexual at all. It includes worship, justice, festivity, decoration, instruction, comradeship, repose. Sex is the gate of that house; and romantic and imaginative people naturally like looking through a gateway. But the house is very much larger than the gate. There are indeed a certain number of people who like to hang about the gate and never get any further.
- The difficulty of explaining why I am a Catholic is that there are 10,000 reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true (O'Brien, 231).
- The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
- The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.
- This triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.
- We do not want, as the newspapers say, a Church that will move with the world. We want a Church that will move the world . . . It is by that test that history will really judge, of any Church, whether it is the real Church or no (Ffinch, 277).
- If there be one thing more than another which is true of genuine democracy, it is that genuine democracy is opposed to the rule of the mob. For genuine democracy is based fundamentally on the existence of the citizen, and the best definition of a mob is a body of a thousand men in which there is no citizen.
- He realized the obvious and simple truth, so often neglected, that if the individual is nothing, then the race is nothing – for the plain mathematical reason that a hundred times nought is nought.
- A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.
Prayer for the Beatification of GKC
God our Father,
You filled the life of your servant Gilbert Keith Chesterton
with a sense of wonder and joy,
and gave him a faith which was the foundation of his ceaseless work;
a hope which sprang from his enduring gratitude for the gift of human life;
and a charity towards all men, particularly his opponents.
May his innocence and his laughter,
his constancy in fighting for the Christian faith in a world losing belief,
his lifelong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary
and his love for all men,
especially for the poor,
bring cheerfulness to those in despair,
conviction and warmth to lukewarm believers
and the knowledge of God to those without faith.
We beg you to grant the favors we ask
through his intercession
so that his holiness may be recognized by all
and the Church may proclaim him Blessed.
We ask this through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Report results
Fr. John Udris
chesterton@oscott.org
info@chesterton.org
Dad and GKC
References