César > César's Quotes

“It can be crazy hard. To keep your faith, to keep going. It can be harder than I ever would have imagined. Sometimes things happen to you, really bad things that aren't fair, things that make you feel so terrible you're not even sure who you are anymore or whether you're right or wrong, good or bad. Sometimes you feel like there's no one to turn to, and you're all alone and so scared you can hardly move and so tired you just want to curl up in a ball and go to sleep forever. I guess that's kind of the way Alex felt that last night I saw him. And that's the way I felt now. But I guess I had one advantage over Alex. I guess in some way I'd been training for this time my whole life. I'd been training every day, even in simple things, little things. I trained to keep my mind sharp when I went to school. I trained in karate to keep my body and spirit strong. Even when I just went to church, or when I prayed by myself, it was a kind of training: I was training to remember that I was not alone. I was never alone.”
― Andrew Klavan

“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“There's a school of thought today that rejects patriotism. People are made nervous by that intense allegiance to a country. They think it can only lead to war and bloodshed and that fights can be avoided if we all just compromise and get along. And, of course, compromise and getting along are great things as long as you're not sacrificing essential values. But I believe there's a line in the sand, some things that you have to be willing to stand up for, even if it means trouble. Charlie's patriotism is not blind, flag-waving jingoism: it's an intense allegiance to the American concept of liberty. He's through and through. He can talk about it and explain it. And he's shown he's willing to give everything for it. I admire him for that.”
― Andrew Klavan

“People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“That the nobility of Man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conquerer of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to maintain faithful to that nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves: and that therefore Mendeleev’s Periodic Table, which just during those weeks we were laboriously learning to unravel, was poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed doen in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed! …

[T]he chemistry and physics on which we fed, besides being in themselves nourishments vital in themselves, were the antidotes to Fascism … because they were clear and distinct and verifiable at every step, and not a tissue of lies and emptiness like the radio and newspapers.”
― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“The man who kills a man kills a man.
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

“But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. . . . As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. . . . The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Brave New Family: G.K. Chesterton on Men and Women, Children, Sex, Divorce, Marriage and the Family

“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Introduction to the Book of Job

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“If you're not at least willing to die for something- something that really matters- in the end, you die for nothing.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Truth of the Matter

“Anyway, God is not susceptible to proofs and disproofs. If you believe, the evidence is all around you. If you don’t believe, no evidence can be enough.”
― Andrew Klavan, The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ

“Does God know I'm still here? Does God know it's still me inside?"
"Sure He does! Of course He does! He's right with you. he's right there."
"Because I feel really alone sometimes."
"You're not alone." I move to her, put my hand on her shoulder. "You're not, believe me.”
― Andrew Klavan, Crazy Dangerous