THE EVERLASTING MAN

Bellow are some Quotes from G. K. Chesterton's immortal work: THE EVERLASTING MAN, published by Ignatius Press (I believe).

This is an awesome book and should be read by all Catholics.


“When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right.” (pg. 10)

“Art is the signature of man.” (pg. 34)

“Man is the microcosm; man is the measure of all things; man is the image of God. These are the only real lessons to be learnt in the cave, and it is time to leave it for the open road.” (pg. 35)

“The most sophistical of all sophists are gymnosophists.” (pg. 36)

“And unfortunately doubt and caution are the last things commonly encouraged by the loose evolutionism of current culture. For that culture is full of curiosity; and the one thing that it cannot endure is the agony of agnosticism. It was in the Darwinian age that the world first became known and the thing first became impossible.” (pg. 44)

“It is necessary to say plainly that all this ignorance is simply covered by imprudence. Statements are made so plainly and positively that man have hardly the moral courage to pause upon them and find that they are without support.” (pg. 44)

“But one of the strange marks of the strength of Christianity is that, since it came, no pagan in our civilization has been able to be really human.” (pg. 68)

“But I am not at issue in this book with sincere and genuine scholars, but with a vast and vague public opinion which has been prematurely spread from certain imperfect investigations, and which has made fashionable a false notion of the whole history of humanity. It is the whole vague notion that a monkey evolved into a man and in the same way a barbarian evolved into a civilized man and therefore at every stage we have to look back to barbarism and forward to civilization. Unfortunately this notion is in a double sense entirely in the air. It is an atmosphere in which men live rather than a thesis which they defend.” (pg. 71)

“But in one sense there is a significance in the old slavery. It stands for one fundamental fact about all antiquity before Christ; something to be assumed from first to last. It is the insignificance of the individual before the State. ... Somebody said, ‘The Man is nothing and the Work is all,’ meaning it for a breezy Carlylean commonplace. It was the sinister motto of the heathen Servile State.” (pg. 72)

“...[H]istory without tradition is dead.” (pg. 72)

“there is unfortunately one fallacy here into which it is very easy for men to fall, even those who are most intelligent and perhaps especially those who are most imaginative. It I the fallacy of supposing that because an idea is greater in the sense of larger, therefore it is greater in the sense of more fundamental and fixed and certain.” (pg. 73)

“...[A]nd when Catholic creeds are identified with various wild myths, I do not laugh or curse or misbehave myself, I confine myself decourously to saying that the identification is not complete.” (pg. 82)

“Man is not indeed the idol; but man is almost everywhere the idolater.” (pg. 83)

“...Paganism ... is the one real rival to the Church of Christ.” (pg. 84)

“To compare the Christian and Confucian religions is like comparing a theist with an English squire or asking whether a man is a believer in immortality or a hundred-per-cent American. Confucianism may be a civilization but it is not a religion.” (pg. 85)

“In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique.” (pg. 85)

“Whatever else there was, there was never any such thing as the Evolution of the Idea of God. The idea was concealed, was avoided, was almost forgotten, was even explained away; but it was never evolved.” (pg. 90)

“...[Syncretism] meant the final loss of all that we now call religion.” (pg. 94)

“It is really the collapse of comparative religion that there is no comparison between God and the gods.” (pg. 99)

“Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never been any such union of the priests and the philosophers.” (pg. 111)

“Henceforth being merely secular would be a servitude and an inhibition. If man cannot pray[,] he is gagged; if he cannot kneel[,] he is in irons.” (pg. 112)

“Those who talk about Pagan Christs have less sympathy with Paganism then with Christianity. Those who call these cults ‘religions,’ and ‘compare’ them with the certitude and challenge of the Church have much less appreciation than we have of what made heathenism human, or of why classic literature is still something that hands in the air like a song.” (pp. 114-115)

“But there is only one sense in which he is worse; and that is not in being positively worse. The Christian is only worse because it is his business to be better.” (pg. 121)

“People would understand better the popular fury against the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly attributed to them was preventing the birth of children.” (pg. 122)

“Confucius was not a religious founder or even a religious teacher; possible not even a religious man. He was not an atheist; he was apparently what we call an agnostic. But the really vital point is that it is utterly irrelevant to talk about his religion at all. It is like talking of theology as the first thing in the story of how Rowland Hill established the postal system or Baden Powell organized the Boy Scouts.” (pp. 127-128)

“Abdication is perhaps the one really absolute action of an absolute monarch.” (pg. 130)

“Perhaps there are nothings out of which we get so little of the truth as the truisms; especially when they are really true.” (pgs. 130-1)

“One thing is certain; it [i.e. Buddhism] has never become anything remotely resembling what we call a Church.” (pg. 133)

“Christianity does appeal to a solid truth outside itself; to something which is in that sense external as well as eternal. It does declare that things are really there; or in other words that things are really things. In this Christianity is at one with common sense; but all religious history shows that this common sense perishes except where there is Christianity to preserve it.” (pg. 135)

“the materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. ... And if you leave things like all the religious wars and all the merely adventurous explorations out of the human story, it will not only cease to be human at all but cease to be a story at all.” (pg. 137)

“The truth is that only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the state. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city; the gods of the hearth.” (pg. 143)

“...[T]he human family itself began to break down under servile organization and the herding of the towns.” (pg. 160)

“...[F]or atheism is abnormality. It is not merely the denial of a dogma. It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees.” (pg. 162)

“The Church contains what the world does not contain. Life itself does not provide as she does for all sides of life. That every other single system is narrow and insufficient compared to this one; that is not a rhetorical boast; it is a real fact and a real dilemma.” (pg. 177)

“But the Wise Men must be seeking wisdom; and for them there must be a light also in the intellect. And this is the light; that the Catholic creed is catholic and that nothing else is catholic. The philosophy of the Church is universal. The philosophy of the philosophers was not universal.” (pg. 179)

“Buddhism may profess to be equally mystical [to the Church]; it does not even profess to be equally military. Islam may profess to be equally military, it does not even profess to be equally metaphysical and subtle. Confucianism may profess to satisfy the need of the philosophers for order and reason; it does not even profess to satisfy the need of the mystics for miracles and sacrament and the consecration of concrete things. There are many evidences of this presence of a spirit at once universal and unique. One will serve here which is the symbol of the subject of this chapter; that no other story, no pagan legend or philosophical anecdote or historical event, does in fact affect any of us with that peculiar and even poignant impression produced on us by the word Bethlehem.” (pg. 184)

“No other birth of a god or childhood of a sage seems to us to be Christmas or anything like Christmas. It is either too cold or too frivolous, or too formal and classical, or too simple & savage, or too occult and complicated. Not one of us, whatever his opinions, would ever go to such a scene with the sense that he was going home.” (pg. 184)

“Whatever else is true, it is emphatically not true that the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable to His time, but are no longer suitable to our time.” (pg. 194)

“there is a sort of notion in the air everywhere that all the religions are equal because all the religious founders were rivals; that they are all fighting for the same starry crown. It is quite false.” (pg. 202)

The Church “was certainly not in the least like merely ethical and idealistic movements in our time. It had a doctrine....” (pg. 217)

“Those who maintain that Christianity was not a church but a moral movement of idealists have been forced to push the period of its perversion or disappearance further and further back.” (pg. 217)

“No, if the ‘ecclesiastical & dogmatic system’ is as old as Pentecost it is as old as Christmas. If we trace it back to such very early Christians we must trace it back to Christ.” (pg. 219)

“If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed.” (pg. 228)

“Islam, historically speaking, is the greatest of the Eastern heresies.” (pg. 234)

“At least five times, therefore, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist Sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died. How complete was the collapse and how strange the reversal, we can only see in detail in the case nearest to our own time.” (pg. 255)

“Meanwhile this solitary thing [i.e. the Catholic Church] that seems at first so outrageous in outline remains solid & sane in substance. It remains the moderator of all these manias; rescuing reason from the Pragmatists exactly as it rescued laughter from the Puritans. I repeat that I have deliberately emphasized its intrinsically defiant and dogmatic character. The mystery is how anything so startling should have remained defiant and dogmatic and yet become perfectly normal and natural.” (pg. 270)

“For it was the soul of Christendom that came forth from the incredible Christ; and the soul of it was common sense.” (pg. 270)


Please notify me, if you care, if there are any typos.