Good Quotes

Yesterday I was writing down quotes from a few of the books I've read recently (more on that odd hobby of mine another time). Here are a few from G.K. Chesterton I thought worth sharing:

"When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for the corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob, a coward - in a word, a man [Peter]. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms of the world have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible"

"The more hopeless is the situation the more hopeful must be the man"

"Millions of mild black-coated men call themselves sane and sensible merely because they always catch the fashionable insanity, because they aren't hurried into madness after madness by the maelstrom of the world"

"Pride is a weakness in the character, it dries up laughter, it dries up wonder, it dries up chivalry and energy"

"There is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter."

"When [a man] drops one doctrine after another in a refined skepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly broad-minded"

"When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into family we step into a fairy-tale"