Big Man > Big's Quotes

“Even
After
All this time
The Sun never says to the Earth,

"You owe me."

Look
What happens
With a love like that,
It lights the whole sky.”
― Hafiz

“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.”
― Hafiz of Shiraz

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“I have never been able to understand where people got the idea that democracy was in some way opposed to tradition. It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record. . . . Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”
― 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

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“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

“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

“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics: The Annotated

“The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown

“There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.”
― G.K. Chesterton, William Blake

“I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller”
― G.K. Chesterton

“if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Passion makes every detail important.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics & Orthodoxy

“I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them. The man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland opening at the gate, is the man with large ideas. His mind creates distance; the motor-car stupidly destroys it....”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“Buddhism and Christianity are in one sense parallel and equal; as a mound and a hollow, as a valley and a hill. There is a sense in which that sublime despair is the only alternative to that divine audacity. It is even true that the truly spiritual and intellectual man sees it as sort of dilemma; a very hard and terrible choice. There is little else on earth that can compare with these for completeness. And he who does not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

“People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like song.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

“I will not call it my philosophy; for I did not make it. God and humanity made it; and it made me.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In a word, what is unique is not America but what is called Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not trying to Anglicise thousand of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders. France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or German prisoners of war. America is the only place in the world where this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on. And the process, as I have pointed out, is not internationalization. It would be truer to say it is the nationalization of the internationalized. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America