Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death or decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or worse, lives on in the immortality of The Larger.

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me, otherwise kill me.

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world?

Is there nothing I have done which will outlive me, other than the opprobrium of my first wife and sons and grandchildren? Do I care? Doesn't everybody? Poor me. Poor practically everybody, with so little durable good to leave behind!

Being immortal must have a lot of attractions. You can travel all over the world, see everything, do everything. But what happens if you are immortal and your friends and family are not? You are then destined to watch them age and die.

Lords of immortality will always fail in the material world.

Technical civilization has made a great error in not suppressing death, the only human reality still intact

What kind of world is this? And what do you do about it? What do you do when the worst thing that can happen actually happens?

As always the thought of his own death calmed him as much as that of others disturbed him: was it perhaps because, when all was said and done, his own death would in the first place mean that of the whole world?

Okay," I said, "what's your biggest fear?" As always, he took a second to think about the answer. "Clowns," he said. "Clowns." "Yup." I just looked at him. "What?" he said, glancing over at me. "That is not a real answer," I told him. "Says who?" "Says me. I meant a real fear, like of failure, of death, of regret. Like that. Something that keeps you awake nights, questioning your very existence." He thought for a second. "Clowns.

Barbarianism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is the whim of circumstance. And barbarianism must ultimately triumph

Finally, the truth. Lying with his face pressed into the dusty carpet of the office where he had once thought he was learning the secrets of victory, Harry understood at last that he was not supposed to survive.

The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog?

The sense of a long last night over civilization is back again; it has perhaps not been here so intensely in thirty years, not since the Nazis were prospering, but it is coming back.

What a horror it would have been if the world was real, because if the world was real, it would be immortal.

What's the point of trying to fix a world we're so briefly in?

If the spiritual universe and the way to it were shown, No one would remain in this world for a single moment.

If we fail to meet our problems here, no one else in the world will do so. If we fail, the heart goes out of progressives throughout the world.

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.

I'd rather die than fade away

If we only identify with the mortal world, then we identify with a level of scarcity and lack and brokenness, and that will be our experience.

The outrage was on the scale of God. My younger brother was immortal and they hadn't noticed. Immortality had been concealed in my brother's body while he was alive, and we hadn't noticed that it dwelt there. Now my brother's body was dead, and immortality with it. ... And the error, the outrage, filled the whole universe.

Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, 'To-morrow, success or failure won't matter much; and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.'