Quote #128

Any one might say that we should be neither quite miserable nor quite happy. But to find out how far one MAY be quite miserable without making it impossible to be quite happy--that was a discovery in psychology. Any one might say, 'Neither swagger nor grovel'; and it would have been a limit. But to say, 'Here you can swagger and there you can grovel'--that was an emancipation.

More from Gilbert Keith Chesterton

  1. Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is al…
  2. Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning …
  3. The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind …
  4. Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.
  5. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense.
  6. The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not pass…
  7. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that …
  8. No one has even begun to understand comradeship who does not accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in eating, drinking, or smoking, an …

All Gilbert Keith Chesterton quotes