Thursday, February 3, 2011

My favorite quote - maybe...

It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult think is to keep one's own.  It is always easy to be a modernist, as it is easy to be a snob.  To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom - that would indeed have been simple.  It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls; only one at which one stands.  To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame.  But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.  Orthodoxy - GK Chesterton
This came up on my calendar.  It is hard to pick one of my favorite quotes.  It is also difficult to point to the epiphany moment when you move from looking at a book to it changing your outlook.  This is very close to filling both.

In his writings Chesterton frequently comes back to a few of his worldview points (off the top of my head):
-doubt has a limit.  accept that you are alive and don't wonder what if we aren't.  "If you want nothing, I can give you nothing."
-Somethings are magic.
-There is a right in the world, and it isn't mankind or man.
-For Christianity to weave thru philosophies, fads, trends, and men leading it and still answer life's questions is miraculous;  to the point that fairy tales would have eroded long ago and it must be true.

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