A Chesterton Calendar: Compiled from the writings of 'G.K.C.' both in verse and in prose. With a section apart for the moveable feasts.Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
A Chesterton Calendar: Compiled from the writings of 'G.K.C.' both in verse and in prose. With a section apart for the moveable feasts.
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith), 1874-1936 -- Calendars
Even among liars there are two classes, one immeasurably better than
another. The honest liar is the man who tells the truth about his old
lies; who says on Wednesday, 'I told a magnificent lie on Monday.' He
keeps the truth in circulation; no one version of things stagnates in
him and becomes an evil secret. He does not have to live with old lies;
a horrible domesticity.
_Introduction to 'The Old Curiosity Shop.'_
AUGUST 4th
The only way to remember a place for ever is to live in the place for
an hour; and the only way to live in the place for an hour is to forget
the place for an hour. The undying scenes we can all see, if we shut
our eyes, are not the scenes we have stared at under the direction
of guide-books; the scenes we see are the scenes at which we did not
look at all--the scenes in which we walked when we were thinking about
something else--about a sin, or a love affair, or some childish sorrow.
We can see the background now because we did not see it then.
_'Charles Dickens.'_
AUGUST 5th
THE keeper of a restaurant would much prefer that each customer should
give his order smartly, though it were for stewed ibis or boiled
elephant, rather than that each customer should sit holding his head
in his hands, plunged in arithmetical calculations about how much food
there can be on the premises.
_'What's Wrong with the World.'_
AUGUST 6th _TRANSFIGURATION_
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret
of the Christian. The tremendous figure which fills the Gospels
towers in this respect, as in every other, above all the
thinkers who ever thought themselves tall. His pathos was natural,
almost casual. The Stoics, ancient and modern, were proud of concealing
their tears. He never concealed His tears; He showed them plainly
on His open face at any daily sight, such as the far sight of His
native city. Yet He concealed something. Solemn supermen and imperial
diplomatists are proud of restraining their anger. He never restrained
His anger. He flung furniture down the front steps of the Temple and
asked men how they expected to escape the damnation of hell. Yet He
restrained something. I say it with reverence; there was in that
shattering personality a thread that must be called shyness. There was
something that He hid from all men when He went up a mountain to pray.
There was something that He covered by abrupt silence or impetuous
isolation. There was some one thing that was too great for God to show
us when He walked upon our earth, and I have sometimes fancied that it
was His mirth.
_'Orthodoxy.'_
AUGUST 7th
Imperialism is foreign, Socialism is foreign, Militarism is foreign,
Education is foreign, strictly even Liberalism is foreign. But
Radicalism was our own; as English as the hedge-rows.
_'Charles Dickens.'_
AUGUST 8th
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