Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Age

• Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Birthday, Book, Writing

• Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Time, Inspiration, Live Life

• An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Monday, Philosophy, Believe

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.55, Simon and Schuster

• 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. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Dream, Men, Thinking

• The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Age, Gold

• No man knows he is young while he is young.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Funny, Witty, Time

• The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Past, Men, Knowing

• This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Progress, Age, Minorities

• There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Age, Unions, Ghost

• Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Winning, Evil, Age

• Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Thinking, Talking

• I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Book, Writing, Epic

• The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towards our equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying a considerable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towards children consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying an unfathomable respect.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Attitude, People

  "The Defendant". Book by G. K. Chesterton, 1901.

• Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes that they have done for some time past they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers... I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Kings, Taken, Past

  "Utopia of Usurers". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, pp. 15-17, 1917.

• Whatever else we may say of our own age, for good or evil, nobody is likely to call it an Age of Reason.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Evil, Age, May

• The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Mean, Past

  What's Wrong with theWorld pt. 1, ch. 5 (1910)

• The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from the past was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila, or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was lost after the introduction of printing, the discovery of America, the founding of the Royal Society, and all the enlightenment of the Renaissance and the modern world. It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human hobby: the habit of thinking.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Dark, Thinking, Past

• The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Children, Men, Catholic

• We have passed the age of the demagogue, the man who has little to say and says it loud. We have come to the age of the mystagogue or don, the man who has nothing to say, but says it softly and impressively in an indistinct whisper.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Age, Littles

  "George Bernard Shaw". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1909.

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