"A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher. A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything."
Heretics is a collection of 20 essays by English writer G. K. Chesterton published by John Lane in 1905. In it, Chesterton quotes at length and argues extensively against atheist Joseph McCabe and delivers diatribes about his close personal friend and intellectual rival George Bernard Shaw, as well as about Friedrich Nietzsche, H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and an array of other major intellectual
"The word heresy not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word orthodoxy not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right."
"When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency. So it is that when a mans body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health. Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims."
"The time of big theories was the time of big results. In the era of sentiment and fine words, at the end of the eighteenth century, men were really robust and effective."
"I do not say that there are no stronger men than these; but will any one say that there are any men stronger than those men of old who were dominated by their philosophy and steeped in their religion? Whether bondage be better than freedom may be discussed. But that their bondage came to more than our freedom it will be difficult for any one to deny."
"As enunciated today, progress is simply a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative."
"But the thing which is irrational any one can understand. That is why religion came so early into the world and spread so far, while science came so late into the world and has not spread at all. History unanimously attests the fact that it is only mysticism which stands the smallest chance of being understanded of the people."