Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes about Past

The past is not what it was.

Past, Progress, Cult

We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

Past, History, Certain

If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Wisdom, Men, Past

Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.336, Simon and Schuster

Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Fighting, Past, Asceticism

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Past, Men, Knowing

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Wisdom, Past, Men

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 passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Christian, Mean, Past

What's Wrong with theWorld pt. 1, ch. 5 (1910)

We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Past, Important, Principles

The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from the past was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila, or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was lost after the introduction of printing, the discovery of America, the founding of the Royal Society, and all the enlightenment of the Renaissance and the modern world. It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human hobby: the habit of thinking.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Dark, Thinking, Past

The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Learning, Past, Romance

Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

War, Past, Ideas

"Daily News", February 18, 1905.

Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes that they have done for some time past they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers... I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Kings, Taken, Past

"Utopia of Usurers". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, pp. 15-17, 1917.

We all live in the past, because there is nothing else to live in. To live in the present is like proposing to sit on a pin. It is too minute, it is too slight a support, it is too uncomfortable a posture, and it is of necessity followed immediately by totally different experiences, analogous to those of jumping up with a yell.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Past, Different Experiences, Jumping

The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Dream, Men, Past

Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes about Past

You May Also Like: