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The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare QUOTES

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare QUOTES

1 " This very pride in keeping his word was that he was keeping it to miscreants. It was his last triumph over these lunatics to go down into their dark room and die for something that they could not even understand. The barrel-organ seemed to give the marching tune with the energy and the mingled noises of a whole orchestra; and he could hear deep and rolling, under all the trumpets of the pride of life, the drums of the pride of death. "

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

2 " Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon. "

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

3 " An artist is identical with an anarchist,' he cried. 'You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.'
'So it is,' said Mr. Syme.
'Nonsense!' said Gregory, who was very rational when any one else attempted paradox. "

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

4 " No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid. "

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

5 " Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy. "

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

6 " 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

7 " He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe. "

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

8 " The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else. "

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

9 " Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity. "

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

10 " Who would condescend to strike down the mere things that he does not
fear? Who would debase himself to be merely brave, like any common
prizefighter? Who would stoop to be fearless--like a tree? Fight the
thing that you fear. You remember the old tale of the English clergyman
who gave the last rites to the brigand of Sicily, and how on his
death-bed the great robber said, 'I can give you no money, but I can
give you advice for a lifetime: your thumb on the blade, and strike
upwards.' So I say to you, strike upwards, if you strike at the stars. "

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

11 " That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. "

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

12 " I sat in the darkness, where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in the daylight I denied it myself.… But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you. I knew how near you were to hell. I know how you, Thursday, crossed swords with King Satan, and how you, Wednesday, named me in the hour without hope. "

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

13 " He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape. "

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

14 " The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick. "

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

15 " For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic pride, secondly tears, and third laughter. "

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

16 " Then the man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right cheek and down in the left.
There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it is even attractive. But in all Syme's circumstances, with the dark dawn and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there was something unnerving in it. There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong. "

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

17 " Perhaps we are both doing what we think right. But what we think right is so damned different that there can be nothing between us in the way of concession. There is nothing possible between us but honor and death. "

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

18 " His soul swayed in a vertigo of moral indecision. He had only to snap the thread of a rash vow made to a villainous society, and all his life could be as open and sunny as the square beneath him. He had, on the other other hand, only to keep his antiquated honour, and be delivered inch by inch into the power of this great enemy of mankind, whose very intellect was a torture-chamber. Whenever he looked down into the square he saw the comfortable policeman, a pillar of common sense and common order. Whenever he looked back at the breakfast-table he saw the President still quietly studying him with big, unbearable eyes. "

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

19 " Every trace of the passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full, that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not the sense of bright moonshine, but rather of a dead daylight. "

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

20 " The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme. I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe! "

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