On Music

"MUSIC is mere beauty; it is beauty in the abstract, beauty in isolation. It is a shapeless and liquid element of beauty, in which a man may really float, not indeed affirming the truth, but not denying it."

~G.K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw.

Woman Playing a Lute, by Bartolomeo Veneto; Oil on panel, 1520.
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

The World State

OH, how I love Humanity,
With love so pure and pringlish,
And how I hate the horrid French,
Who never will be English!

The International Idea,
The largest and the clearest,
Is welding all the nations now,
Except the one that’s nearest.

This compromise has long been known,
This scheme of partial pardons,
In ethical societies
And small suburban gardens –

The villas and the chapels where
I learned with little labour
The way to love my fellow-man
And hate my next-door neighbour.

~G.K. Chesterton

Priestcraft & Mariolatry

"I AM very proud of what people call priestcraft; since even that accidental term of abuse preserves the mediaeval truth that a priest, like every other man, ought to be a craftsman. I am very proud of what people call Mariolatry; because it introduced into religion in the darkest ages that element of chivalry which is now being belatedly and badly understood in the form of feminism."

~G.K. Chesterton: Autobiography.

Coronation of the Virgin, by Domenico Ghirlandaio. Fresco, 1486-90;
Cappella Tornabuoni, Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

"I am very proud of my religion"

“AS an apologist I am the reverse of apologetic. So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalistic friends repeat with so much tenacity), for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated.”

~G.K. Chesterton: Autobiography.

Disputation of the Holy Sacrament (La Disputa), by Raffaello Sanzio.
Fresco, 1510-11; Stanza della Segnatura, Palazzi Pontifici, Vatican.

At Amazon
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"The Blessed Virgin"

"I DO NOT want to be in a religion in which I am allowed to have a crucifix. I feel the same about the much more controversial question of the honour paid to the Blessed Virgin. If people do not like that cult, they are quite right not to be Catholics. But in people who are Catholics, or call themselves Catholics, I want the idea not only liked but loved and loved ardently, and above all proudly proclaimed. I want it to be what the Protestants are perfectly right in calling it; the badge and sign of a Papist. I want to be allowed to be enthusiastic about the existence of the enthusiasm; not to have my chief enthusiasm coldly tolerated as an eccentricity of myself."

~G.K. Chesterton: Autobiography.

Coronation of the Virgin (Cell 9), by Fra Angelico.
Fresco, 1440-42; Convento di San Marco, Florence.

"The very stones cry out"

“CHRIST prophesied the whole of Gothic architecture in that hour when nervous and respectable people (such as now object to barrel-organs) objected to the gutter-snipes of Jerusalem. He said, “If these were silent, the very stones would cry out.” Under the impulse of His spirit arose a clamorous like chorus the facades of the medieval cathedrals, thronged with shouting faces and open mouths. The prophecy has fulfilled itself: the very stones cry out.”

~G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy.

Detail of sculptures on the west front, Reims Cathedral.

"Free speech"

"IT is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that an institution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is not natural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations which you believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural or obvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect half a town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, is a theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time but once admitted, it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, but philosophy, ethics, and finally, poetry."

~G.K. Chesterton: Robert Browning.