Alfred Kessler, an avid collector of the works of G. K. Chesterton, recounts a classic Chesterton anecdote first told by David Magee, an Englishman who ran a bookshop in San Francisco. Magee's parents had been neighbors and friends of the Chestertons in Beaconsfield, England, and as a boy David was an acquaintance of the young Chesterton. As an adult, Chesterton stood six feet, four inches tall and weighed close to 300 pounds. So whenever Chesterton visited the Magees for tea, he was served at a table with a concavity cut out of it to accommodate his enormous girth. His appetite was not the only prodigious thing about Chesterton. He was vastly well read and incredibly productive, writing short stories, novels, plays, poems, thousands of essays, and close to 100 books. Like Samuel Johnson, for a time he published his own periodical, GK. s Weekly. He was devout, erudite, witty, and absentminded. He was notoriously inept at keeping appointments and was in the habit of sending telegrams from the road to his wife to discover what was next on his schedule. One of the most famous reads: "Am at Market Harbor-ough. Where ought I to be?"
Essential Aphorisms
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.
He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.
The past is not what it was.
The only defensible war is a war of defense.
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers.
When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies;probably because they are generally the same people.
The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.
Form
GEARY'S GUIDE TO THE WORLD'S GREAT APHORISTS
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