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Today I have collected a few tantalising quotes from G.K. Chesterton’s book “Orthodoxy“. Once again, it is available on Kindle and it is free. I hope the following tempt to you to read the book and follow his arguments for faith. Although some of his references to people of his day (excepting well known authors and historical figures) do not connect with the modern reader, his humour and the flow of his thinking are a joy. Best of all, it is an antidote to modernism and post-modernism. The quotes come from Chapter 2, The Maniac and Chapter 3 The Suicide of Thought
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic.
The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.
It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have seen it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself. You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves. You cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world. It might certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered by the application of indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd pretence that modern England is Christian. But it would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow. Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted; but rather because they are an old minority than because they are a new one. Free thought has exhausted its own freedom.
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith) (1994-05-01). Orthodoxy Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.
Travels from Ur 