Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

To be modern is to destroy nature.

But we moderns are impatient and destructive.

There is always more surface to a shattered object than a whole.

The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us.

The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do.

And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you’d read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor.

You got to do what's happening today in the world. You got to keep up with time. Keep up to date, keep modern - keep up on your toes!

We've taken the world apart but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.

The crown o' the earth doth melt. My lord! O, wither'd is the garland of the war, The soldier's pole is fall'n: young boys and girls Are level now with men; the odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon.

Out of intense complexities, intense simplicities emerge

We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers-that is to say, as markets.

All the world does as it is supposed to, except for humans. Maybe that's why you so often want to kill each other.

Organizational progress parallels that in science and technology, permitting ultimate simplicity through intermediate complexity.

Too long, the earth has been a madhouse!

Entropy shakes its angry fist at you for being clever enough to organize the world. (p 2)

The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away.

The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings.

The world has become too full of many things, an over furnished room.

The rising sun managed to peek around the vast column of smoke that forever rose from Ankh-Morpork, City of Cities, illustrating almost up to the edge of space that smoke means progress or, at least, people setting fire to things.

For once, you're going to hear something that doesn't fit into your neat, compartmentalized world of order and logic and reason.

The world isn't tidy; it's a mess. I don't try to make it neat.

If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

Love is an untamed force. When we try to control it, it destroys us. When we try to imprison it, it enslaves us. When we try to understand it, it leaves us feeling lost and confused.