Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Enthusiasm

• Sir Hiram Maxim is a genuine and typical example of the man of science, romantic, excitable, full of real but somewhat obvious poetry, a little hazy in logic and philosophy, but full of hearty enthusiasm and an honorable simplicity. He is, as he expresses it, "an old and trained engineer," and is like all of the old and trained engineers I have happened to come across, a man who indemnifies himself for the superhuman or inhuman concentration required for physical science by a vague and dangerous romanticism about everything else.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Philosophy, Real, Science

• Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Progress, Looks

  "What's Wrong with the World" by G. K. Chesterton, (Part One: The Homelessness Of Man, Ch. 4), 1910.

• I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly; we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wise, Men, Pigs

• There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Boredom, Humanity, Quality

  1905 Heretics, ch.3.

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