Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.
Gilbert K. ChestertonA building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.
Gilbert K. ChestertonA good civilisation spreads over us freely like a tree, varying and yielding because it is alive. A bad civilisation stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella-artificial, mathematical in shape; not merely universal, but uniform.
Gilbert K. ChestertonThe old religionist cried out for his god. The new religionist cries out for some god to be his.
Gilbert K. ChestertonNo man can break any of the Ten Commandments. He can only break himself against them.
Gilbert K. ChestertonBowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge.
Gilbert K. Chesterton