Chris Wright

“The defect we see, in what is, is simply that it is not all that is. God is more actual even than Man; more actual even than Matter; for God with all His powers at every instant is immortally in action.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas

“You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, preserved from childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us. Perhaps we may even grow wicked later on, may be unable to refrain from a bad action, may laugh at men’s tears and at those people who say as Kolya did just now, “I want to suffer for all men,” and may even jeer spitefully at such people. But however bad we may become— which God forbid— yet, when we recall how we buried Ilyusha, how we loved him in his last days, and how we have been talking life friends all together, at this stone, the cruelest and most mocking of us— if we do become so—will not dare to laugh inwardly at having been kind and good at this moment! What’s more, perhaps, that one memory may keep him from great evil and he will reflect and say, “Yes, I was good and brave and honest then!” Let him laugh to himself, that’s no matter, a man often laughs at what’s good and kind. That’s only from thoughtlessness. But I assure you, boys, that as he laughs he will say at once in his heart, “No, I do wrong to laugh, for that’s not a thing to laugh at.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Rituals and festivals, like those of a great national or international wedding-day, contain a thousand things to remind us that our countrymen inherit an experience much more lively and complex than any such local and temporary solution; and warn us against allowing the present to become more narrow than the past.”
― G.K. Chesterton, As I Was Saying: A Chesterton Reader

“I have pointed out that mere modern free-thought has left everything in a fog, including itself. The assertion that thought is free led first to the denial that will is free; but even about that there was no real determination among the Determinists. In practice, they told men that they must treat their will as free as though it was not free. In other words, Man must live a double life; which is exactly the old heresy of Tiger of Brabant about the Double Mind. In other words, the nineteenth century left everything in chaos; and the importance of Thomas to the twentieth century is that it may give us back a cosmos. We can give here only the rudest sketch of how Aquinas, like Agnostics, beginning in the cosmic cellars, yet climbed to the cosmic towers.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas