Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Past

• 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

• 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

• There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Courage, Morning, Flower

  "What's Wrong With the World". Book by G. K. Chesterton, 1910.

• We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Past, History, Certain

• The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wisdom, Past, Men

• 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

• The past is not what it was.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Past, Progress, Cult

• If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wisdom, Men, Past

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.336, Simon and Schuster

• 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

• 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.

• The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Dream, Men, Past

• We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Past, Important, Principles

• 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)

• We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Past, Different Experiences, Jumping

• 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 fact is that purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure and an education in gratitude.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Weed, Gratitude, Appreciation

• The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Learning, Past, Romance

• Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  War, Past, Ideas

  "Daily News", February 18, 1905.

• Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Fighting, Past, Asceticism

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