Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Tragedy

• This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic-that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wisdom, Men, Thinking

• The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness of a sick room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Christian, Laughter, Angel

• Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Tragedy, Deuces, Comic

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.209, Simon and Schuster

• He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Encouragement, Heart, Tragedy

• The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Catholic, Tragedy

• A tragedy means always a mans struggle with that which is stronger than man.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Struggle, Mean, Men

• Very few people in the world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Character, Men

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