Gilbert Keith Chesterton
God
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God. That fact is written all across human history; but it is written most plainly across that recent history of Russia; which was created by Lenin. There the Government is the God, and all the more the God, because it proclaims aloud in accents of thunder, like every other God worth worshipping, the one essential commandment: 'Thou shalt have no other gods but Me.' "
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “Christendom in Dublin”, in the Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 20
Christianity
« Seule l'Église chrétienne, historique, fut fondée sur un homme faible, et pour cette raison elle est indestructible, car aucune chaîne ne peut être moins forte que son maillon le plus faible. »
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, cité par Maurice G. Dantec, American Black Box (2006), éd. Albin Michel, coll. Livre de Poche, 2009, p. 179
"I am very glad that our fashionable fiction seems to be full of a return to paganism, for it may possibly be the first step of a return to Christianity. Neo-pagans have sometimes forgotten, when they set out to do everything the old pagans did, that the final thing the old pagans did was to get christened."
Modernity
"The modern world is full of Christian ideas gone mad."
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy, III, 1908
- « Le monde moderne est plein d'anciennes vertus chrétiennes devenues folles. »
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxie, III, 1908
« Le monde moderne est plein d'hommes qui s'en tiennent aux dogmes si fermement qu'ils ignorent même que ce sont des dogmes. »
"Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative."
"My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday."
Conservatism
« Tous les hommes qui dans l'histoire, ont eu une action réelle sur l'avenir, avaient les yeux fixés sur le passé. »
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Ce qui cloche dans le monde
« Le monde s'est divisé entre Conservateurs et Progressistes. L'affaire des Progressistes est de continuer à commettre des erreurs. L'affaire des Conservateurs est d'éviter que les erreurs ne soient corrigées. »
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 19 avril 1924
Perversion
« Otez le surnaturel, il ne reste plus que ce qui n’est pas naturel. »
« L’humanité est déséquilibrée à l’endroit du sexe et la santé véritable ne lui est permise que dans la sainteté. »
Patriotism
"So awfully alive is that Christian thing called a nation that its very death is a living death. It is a living death which lasts a hundred times longer than any life of man."
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Thing Called a Nation
Reason
"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, A Short History of England, Ch.10
"I know that people charge the Church with lowering reason, but it is just the other way. Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason."
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Father Brown Stories (1911), éd. Penguin Books, coll. Penguin Popular Classics, 1994 (ISBN 0-14-062259-4), p. 21
- « - [...] Je sais qu'on accuse l'Église d'abaisser la raison, mais c'est le contraire qui est vrai. L'Église est seule sur terre à faire de la raison l'instance suprême. L'Église est seule sur terre à affirmer que Dieu lui-même est limité par la raison. »
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Father Brown Stories (1911), éd. Penguin Books, coll. Penguin Popular Classics, 1994 (ISBN 0-14-062259-4), p. 21, trad. Wikiquote
Communism
"Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle."
- Gilbert Keith Chesterton, What I Saw in America, New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1922, p. 236
External links
- G.K. Chesterton Institute for Faith & Culture
- G. K. Chesterton Selected Quotations
- http://chesterton.over-blog.com
- Quotations from Wikiquote