For what is the matter with most of what calls itself the modern mind is simply grooves; and our habit of being content in the grooves, because we are told that they are grooves of change… Its only form of progress is going quicker and quicker along one line in one direction. It has not the curiosity to stop, nor the adventurous courage to go backwards… Now, in spite of the wildest claims to independence, the intellectual life of today still strikes me as being mainly symbolized by the train or the track or the groove. There is any amount of fuss and vivacity about certain fixed fashions or directions of thought; just as there is any amount of rapidity along the fixed rails of the railway-track. But if we begin to think about really getting off the track, we shall find that what is true of the train is equally true of the truth. We shall find it is actually harder to get out of the groove, when the train is going fast, than when the train is going slowly. We shall find that rapidity is rigidity; that the very fact of some social or political or artistic movement going quicker and quicker means that fewer peopole have the courage to move against it. And at last perhaps nobody will make a leap for real intellectual liberty, just as nobody will jump out of a railway-train at eighty miles an hour. This seems to me the primary mark of what we call progressive thought in the modern world.
Essay: The New Groove
It cannot be right that religion should be the dullest of subjects. There must be something wrong if the most important human business is also the least exciting. There must be something wrong if everything is not interesting.
Essay: Reading the Riddle
There is no better test of a man’s ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong.
Essay: The Real Dr. Johnson
The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness; and everyone must choose his side.
Speech: Chesterton awoke from semi-consciousness to declare these words before passing on.
If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?
Book: Mere Christianity
Simple truths pass us by when we are not in the habit of living honestly.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
Book: What’s Wrong With the World
One reaction is to jettison what one has been taught but not really learned. The other is really to learn it.
Essay: Implicit Philosophy
Being discontented with prevailing opinion is scarcely confined to Thomists. It is in a way the mark of the philosopher.
Essay: Implicit Philosophy
Learning, then, is less about amassing a certain body of knowledge than about cultivating the habit of asking questions and seeking true answers.
Atheism is not a philosophy. It is not even a view of the world. It is simply an admission of the obvious.
Book: Letter to a Christian Nation
Being a truly advanced white person means being able to speak with authority about pretty much any field of conversation—especially politics. In order for white people to streamline the process of knowing everything, all human beings can be neatly filed into one of two categories: People I Agree With, and People Who are Just Like Adolf Hitler.
To all such arguments against religious truth, it is sufficient to reply, that no one who does not seek the truth with all his heart and strength, can tell what is of importance and what is not; that to attempt carelessly to decide on points of faith or morals is a matter of serious presumption… “Seek, and ye shall find;” this is the Divine rule, “If thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for understanding; if thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God” (Prov. ii. 3-5).
Book: Parochial and Plain Sermons, VIII, 13
To be ordinarily stupid you only need ordinary intelligence, but to be extraordinarily stupid, you need extraordinary intelligence.
TV: Suffering & What to Do With It
Man is always influenced by thought of some kind, his own or somebody else’s; that of somebody he trusts or that of somebody he never heard of, thought at first, second or third hand; thought from exploded legends or unverified rumours; but always something with the shadow of a system of values and a reason for preference. A man does test everything by something. The question here is whether he has ever tested the test.
Essay: The Revival of Philosophy—Why?
If the intellect is the soul’s navigator, the will is its captain. A wise captain listens to his navigator, but it is the captain who is in charge and ultimately responsible for the ship.
Book: Catholic Christianity
To have a lie in our soul about what is, this is the very worst thing that can happen to us. No one could put such a lie there but we ourselves. We usually put it there because we want to lie to ourselves in order to continue doing what does not conform to the proper order of our soul.
Just as the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt constantly washed into is mouth by the ocean of uncertainty, so the nonbeliever is troubled by doubts about his unbelief, about the real totality of the world he has made up his mind to explain as a self-contained whole … [He too] remains threatened by the question of whether belief is not after all the reality it claims to be… . Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief may after all be the truth. It is not until belief is rejected that its unrejectability becomes evident.
Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next, make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature. Attractive because it promises true good.
Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
Book: The Magician’s Nephew
Dawkins is a master of setting up a straw man, and then dismantling it with great relish. In fact, it is hard to escape the conclusion that such repeated mischaracterizations of faith betray a vitriolic personal agenda, rather than a reliance on the rational arguments that Dawkins so cherishes in the scientific realm.
Book: The Language of God
Grace is never denied the man who does his best.
Book: Letters to a Doubter
Critics of theism were not, as they liked to think, disposing of it from a position of unchallengeable neutrality, but proposing an alternative metaphysics of some kind or other which it was incumbent upon them to acknowledge and defend.
Book: “War and Friendship”, from James Clark, Philosophers Who Believe
The evidence for the existence of God is, if not actually coercive, so overwhelmingly strong that no man who was governed by reason would be content to leave this question undecided.
Book: Within That City
It is often possible to discriminate between the beliefs which result from a careful examination of the evidence and the beliefs which are imposed by the tyranny of fashion. The man who is confident that he can defend his beliefs by reason meets argument with argument. The man who has no such confidence, or whose confidence is flecked with doubt, is tempted to attack the arguer rather than the argument.
Book: Within That City
It is unthinkable that a search so deeply rooted in human nature would be completely vain and useless. The capacity to search for truth and to pose questions itself implies the rudiments of a response. Human beings would not even begin to search for something of which they knew nothing or for something which they thought was wholly beyond them. Only the sense that they can arrive at an answer leads them to take the first step.
Book: Fides et Ratio, 29.
We are living to-day in…a period which it was fashionable to disbelieve in miracles and anathema to disbelieve in evolution. Mental snobbery might be defined as the uncritical acceptance of beliefs merely because they are modish, and it is undeniable that for every man whose belief in evolution is the outcome of examining the evidence, there are a hundred whose views on these questions are determined by the mental fashions of the age in which they live.
Book: Within That City
“Listen!” said the White Spirit. “Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again; even now.”
Book: The Great Divorce
If one gives answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.
Book: Holy Bible
He forgets that it is a deduction at all and treats it as a first principle. He might discover that the whole calculation is a mis-calculation… But he has forgotten that it is a calculation, and is almost ready to contradict the sun if it does not fit into the Solar System.
Book: The Everlasting Man
I thought that he appeared wise to many people and especially to himself, but he was not. I then tried to show him that he thought himself wise, but that he was not. As a result he came to dislike me, and so did many of the bystanders. So I withdrew and thought to myself: “I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know”.
Book: Apology
When the Lion had first begun singing, long ago when it was still quite dark, he had realized that the noise was a song. And he had disliked the song very much. It made him think and feel things he did not want to think and feel. Then, when the sun rose and he saw that the singer was a lion (“only a lion,” as he said to himself) he tried his hardest to make believe that it wasn’t singing and never had been singing—only roaring as any lion might in a zoo in our own world. “Of course it can’t really have been singing,” he thought, “I must have imagined it. I’ve been letting my nerves get out of order. Who ever heard of a lion singing?” And the longer and more beautiful the Lion sang, the harder Uncle Andrew tried to make himself believe that he could hear nothing but roaring. Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. Uncle Andrew did. He soon did hear nothing but roaring in Aslan’s song. Soon he couldn’t have heard anything else even if he had wanted to.
Book: The Magician’s Nephew
Those who fear the Lord will form true judgments, and like a light they will kindle righteous deeds. A sinful man will shun reproof, and will find a decision according to his liking.
Book: Holy Bible
Let neither of us assert that he has found truth; let us seek it as if it were unknown to us both. For truth can be sought with zeal and unanimity if by no rash presumption it is believed to have been already found and ascertained.
Book: Contra Epistolam Manichaei Quam Vacant Fundamenti
What I mean by the slavery of the mind is that state in which men do not know of the alternative. It is something which clogs the imagination, like a drug or a mesmeric sleep, so that a person cannot possibly think of certain things at all. It is not the state in which he says, “I see what you mean; but I cannot think that because I sincerely think this” (which is simply rational): it is one in which he has never thought of the other view; and therefore does not even know that he has never thought of it… The thing I mean is man’s inability to state his opponent’s view; and often his inability even to state his own.
Book: The Thing
For the modern world will accept no dogmas upon any authority; but it will accept any dogmas on no authority. Say that a thing is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be dismissed as a superstition without examination. But preface your remark merely with “they say” or “don’t you know that?” or try (and fail) to remember the name of some professor mentioned in some newspaper and the keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say.
Book: The Superstition of Divorce
We are supposed to live in a skeptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity. The “death of God,” or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church—from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of “The Da Vinci Code”.
The modern world tends to be skeptical about everything that makes demands on man’s higher faculties. But it is not at all skeptical about skepticism, which demands hardly anything.
Book: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 60.