On Ghost Stories

“I CAN claim to be tolerably detached on the subject of ghost stories. I do not depend upon them in any way; not even in the sordid professional way, in which I have at some periods depended on murder stories. I do not much mind whether they are true or not. I am not, like a Spiritualist, a man whose religion may said to consist entirely of ghosts. But I am not like a Materialist, a man whose whole philosophy is exploded and blasted and blown to pieces by the most feeble and timid intrusion of the most thin and third-rate ghost. I am quite ready to believe that a number of ghosts were merely turnip ghosts, elaborately prepared to deceive the village idiot. But I am not at all certain that they succeeded even in that; and I suspect that their greatest successes were elsewhere. For it is my experience that the village idiot is very much less credulous than the town lunatic. On the other hand, when the merely skeptical school asks us to believe that every sort of ghost has been a turnip ghost, I think such skeptics rather exaggerate the variety and vivacity and theatrical talent of turnips.”

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, May 30, 1936.

"They will become again a religious people"

"IF we ever get the English back on to the English land they will become again a religious people, if all goes well, a superstitious people. The absence from modern life of both the higher and the lower forms of faith is largely due to a divorce from nature and the trees and clouds. If we have no more turnip ghosts it is chiefly from the lack of turnips."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Heretics.

"The Two-Headed Giant"

"THEN Redlegs said suddenly, “I should very much like to see a Two-Headed Giant. Lend me a sword.” Then they all roared with laughter and told him how silly he was to think that he could kill the Two-Headed Giant when they couldn’t even kill the One-Headed Giant. But he went off all the same, with his head in the air, and he found the Two-Headed Giant on the great hills where it is always Sunset. And then he found out a funny thing. The Two-Headed Giant did not rush at him and tear him to pieces as he had expected. It certainly did scream and shout and bellow and blare and with its two heads together. But the two heads were, as a matter of fact, screaming and shouting and bellowing and blaring in an odd way. They were screaming and shouting and bellowing and blaring at EACH OTHER.

"One head said, “You are a Pro-Boer”; the other said, with bitter humour, “You’re another”; in fact, the argument might have gone on for ever, growing more savage and brilliant every moment, but it was cut short by Redlegs, who took out the great sword he had borrowed from one of the Knights and poked it sharply into the Giant and killed him. The huge creature sprawled and writhed like a continent in an earthquake; and one wild head lifted itself for a moment in death and said to the other, “You are beneath my notice”. Then it died happy. Redlegs went on along the road that had been guarded by the Two-Headed Giant, until he came to the Castle of the Princess. After a few words of explanation, I need hardly say they were MARRIED."

~From "The Disadvantage of Having Two Heads," printed in The Coloured Lands: Fairy Stories, Comic Verse and Fantastic Pictures, by G.K. Chesterton.

"You can make nothing. You can only destroy."

“DO you see this lantern?” cried Syme in a terrible voice. “Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy mankind; you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit to find it.”

~G.K. Chesterton:  The Man Who Was Thursday, A Nightmare.

"I do not see ghosts"

"WE have all met the man who says that some odd things have happened to him, but that he does not really believe that they were supernatural. My own position is the opposite of this. I believe in the supernatural as a matter of intellect and reason, not as a matter of personal experience. I do not see ghosts; I only see their inherent probability."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Tremendous Trifles.

The Joy of Dullness

"IT is a dogma imposed on all, by the dogmatic secularism of the modern system, that Youth needs, must have, and cannot possibly be happy without, a riot of dances, plays, or entertainments. We all know the practical truth embodied in this; and yet I am so doubtful about the fashionable assumption that I think it very nearly untrue. I have no objections to dances, plays and masquerades: on the contrary, I enjoy them enormously; but then I am not what is commonly called a Youth. And from what I remember of being young, and what I have read of the real reminiscences of youth, I incline to think that youth never shows its glorious vividness and vitality so much as when transfiguring what might be called monotony.... Youth is much more capable of amusing itself than is now supposed, and in much less mortal need of being amused."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, May 3, 1930.

"Man is the moral center of this world"

“NO; that argument about man looking mean and trivial in the face of the physical universe has never terrified me at all, because it is a merely sentimental argument, and not a rational one in any sense or degree. But if we are seriously debating whether a man is the moral center of this world, then he is no more morally dwarfed by the fact that his is not the largest star than by the fact that he is not the largest mammal. Unless it can be maintained a priori that Providence must put the largest soul in the largest body, and must make the physical and moral center the same, “the vertigo of the infinite” has no more spiritual value than the vertigo of a ladder or the vertigo of a balloon."

~G.K. Chesterton:  Illustrated London News, Feb. 19, 1910.