G.K Chesterton

I've been finding out more abt G.K Chesteron lately. He is one of the writers who has inspired Philip Yancey, one of my fav writers.
Interestingly, G.K Chesteron's writings caused the conversion of another literary great...C.S Lewis!! n his writings have also been praised by authors such as W.H Auden, Frederick Buechner, T.S Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Agatha Christie, Orson Welles, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and more. (Wah...tt's like the Lit hall of fame.)

I love discovering this mutual circle of appreciation/influence among my fav writers...or singers (which happens a lot too) It's way cool lah!

Btw Ed, according to Wikiepdia, "G.K Chesteron loved to debate, often publicly debating with friends such as George Bernard Shaw,
H.G WELLS, Bertrand Russell, and Clarence Darrow. Chesterton was usually considered the winner. According to his autobiography, he and George Bernard Shaw played cowboys in a silent movie that was never released." haha! The silent movie part quite farnee too.

Anyway...here's a little background on the Chesterton from www.wikipedia.org....and a couple of excellent, witty quotes from him. :)

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Gilbert Keith Chesterton (May 29, 1874 – June 14, 1936) was an English writer of the early 20th century. Chesterton was known as the "prince of paradox" because he communicated his conservative, often countercultural, ideas in an off-hand, whimsical prose studded with startling formulations. For example: "Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.


"Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten."

"Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly."

"How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it."

"One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance."

"There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind."

"If there were no God, there would be no atheists."

"All things are from God; and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves; and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion."