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Writings on Christianity

Manalive Quotes

G.K. Chesterton’s “Manalive” Quotes

Here’s some quotes from G.K. Chesterton’s book “Manalive”

 “People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.”

“The truth is that when people are in exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must, and they always do, create institutions. When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules.”

“Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.”

“I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him—only to bring him to life.”

“”`I don’t deny,’ he said, `that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.”

“Every revolution, like a repentance, is a return.’”

“But don’t you see that all these real leaps and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden—to something we have had, to something we at least have heard of? Don’t you see one only breaks the fence or shoots the moon in order to get HOME?’”

“”Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.””

“His principle can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive. He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect, that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world…For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property; for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to his own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, and leaving her about (so to speak) at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement. He seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of his bride to keep alive the sense of her perpetual value, and the perils that should be run for her sake.”

 

By Tom Schmidt

Christian, husband of Rach, Church Planter,musician,

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