Happy Birthday, G.K. Chesterton!

Last updated on: March 18, 2013 at 2:20 pm by Jeffrey Overstreet

Happy Birthday, G.K. Chesterton! 2013-03-18T14:20:10-06:00 Jeffrey Overstreet

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When asked to list my ten Desert Island Books, I always include G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. So I would be embarrassed if I did not mark today’s importance.

From today’s Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of the novelist and essayist G.K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton, (books by this author) born in London, England (1874). He’s remembered today for his detective novels about the bumbling, crime-solving priest Father Brown, but during his lifetime he was primarily known as an essayist. He wrote constantly, about politics, society, literature, and religion. He was one of the first critics to argue that Charles Dickens was a great novelist, after the decline of his reputation in the early 20th century. He was one of the first people to argue that the influence of religion on public life would be replaced by the influence of advertisements.

Here are a few of my favorite G.K. Chesterton quotes:

– “The point of an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid.”

– “Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”

– “The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.”

– “By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.”

– “The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.”

– “You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.”

– “It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.”

– “All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.”

– “There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.”

– “These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.”

– “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

– “The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”

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