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21 " something that is in the very nature of nature-worship. We can already see men becoming unhealthy by the worship of health; becoming hateful by the worship of love; becoming paradoxically solemn and overstrained even by the idolatry of sport; and in some cases strangely morbid and infected with horrors by the perversion of a just sympathy with animals. . . . There "
― Dale Ahlquist , G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense
22 " Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. Never "
― Dale Ahlquist , The Complete Thinker: The Marvelous Mind of G.K. Chesterton
23 " The two first facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous. . . . [A]ll "
24 " We already use catchwords as substitutes for thinking, thereby limiting our vocabulary along with the use of our brains. In "
25 " Popular science tries to define realities, and then finds that the definition can be extended to any number of unrealities. "
26 " Materialism is really our established church; for the Government will really help it to persecute the heretics. "
― Dale Ahlquist , Common Sense 101: Lessons from Chesterton
27 " whenever he hears a man say that life is not worth living, he takes out the gun and offers to shoot him. “Always with the most satisfactory results”, he laughs. "
28 " The moderns say that they are leaving the past, because it is exhausted; but they lie. They are escaping from the past because it is so strong. "
29 " The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their common sense. "
30 " when I say that children should be taught to think I do not mean (like many moderns) that they should be taught to doubt; for the two processes are not only not the same, but are in many ways opposite. To doubt is only to destroy; to think is to create. "
31 " Chesterton says that thinking is the hardest work in the world. And hard work, he says, is repugnant to our nature. "
32 " The world we live in is a mess. It does no good to deny it. And it does no good to deny that G. K. Chesterton prophetically described the mess we are in. But he also described why it has happened, and he proposed solutions for cleaning it up. "
― Dale Ahlquist , Knight of the Holy Ghost: A Short History of G.K. Chesterton
33 " Those who merely denounce intolerance seem to have no theory at all with which to defend toleration. "
34 " There are, he claims, two kinds of people in the world: those who are dogmatic and know it, and those who are dogmatic and don’t know it. "
35 " can’t remember the third! “In Defense of Rash Vows” was so appropriate. Susan and I had exchanged our marriage vows less than five months before. Chesterton wrote: “The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that he may not keep the appointment. "
― Dale Ahlquist , My Name Is Lazarus: 34 Stories of Converts Whose Path to Rome Was Paved by G. K. Chesterton
36 " All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that? "
37 " Paradox is not just a logician’s art. It is every man’s tool to understand the real world we inhabit for a short time, and how it shapes our everlasting life. Paradox is a tool so common that a carpenter once used it to explain the depth of our existence. "
38 " In his book on the saint, Chesterton says that, for Francis, religion was not a theory but a love affair, and “there are those who do not believe that a heavenly love can be as real as an earthly love. "
39 " There is the striking chapter on “The Five Deaths of the Faith” near the end of The Everlasting Man, arguably Chesterton’s masterpiece, in which he declares that “Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. "
40 " wrong. . . .[Some] people merely take the modern mood . . . and then require any creed to be cut down to fit that mood. But "