G.K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)

On this day in 1936 G.K. Chesterton, writer and journalist, died. His writings – stories, essays, poems, books, journalism – are infused with an unequalled joy and love of truth.

In youth, he went through a crisis of nihilistic pessimism and it was his recovery from this that led him to God and ultimately to conversion. “The Devil made me a Catholic”, he said – meaning that it was the experience of evil and nothingness that convinced him of the goodness and sanity of the world and his Creator. His poem “The Ballade of a Suicide” celebrates the salvific value of ordinary things; his novel, “The Man who was Thursday”, narrates the fight for sanity in an insane world and ponders the paradox of God; and “Orthodoxy”, written long before he became a Catholic, highlights orthodoxy not as a dead and static thing but as the only possible point of equilibrium between crazy heresies any one of which would drive us mad.

He took part in all the major controversies of his age, and was a lifelong adversary and friend of socialists and atheists such as George Bernard Shaw. These controversies were conducted with passion but with unfailing charity: he never sought to defeat his opponents, only to defeat their ideas. He would never cheat to score a point: and his love for the people he fought against is something that all controversialists should imitate, however hard it may be. Read him, and pray for him.

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Favorite Quotations

"He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head." - Tremendous Trifles, 1909

"Complaint always comes back in an echo from the ends of the world; but silence strengthens us." - The Father Brown Omnibus

"He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative." - Varied Types

"Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all." - Heretics, 1905

"The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis." - "David Copperfield," Chesterton on Dickens, 1911

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people." - ILN, 7/16/10

"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man." - Introduction to the Book of Job, 1907

"Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it." - ILN, 2/24/06

"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die." (Orthodoxy)

"Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections." (Illustrated London News, June 6, 1931)

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