Misc. Chesterton

It's Sunday, and we normally don't post on Sundays. But it's the 16-Days of Chesterton, so I went through Michael Coren's biography, Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton, and pulled out some good lines:

Gilbert could always, would always, be a threat to those who regarded themselves as comfortably entrenched in either the old philosophies or the new ideas.

Joy, happiness, was to Gilbert what conformity was to other theologians; it took on the importance of a virtual sacrament to him. "Man is more himself, man is more manlike," he wrote, "when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial."

There is little doubt that if his cause had been socialism or the pursuit of the permissive age he would now be known and read by a far larger audience.

Gilbert's symbol of hospitality was always sausages and beer.

Gilbert could, and would, write under the influence of alcohol, with no visible difficulties or impairments to his thought and clarity.