Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton

I feed my misanthropy of delicacies and she, in response, gets fat.

Then I completed another year, smiling, and this time with a Chesterton volume in my hands.

Chesterton…

If I had read him at twenty, I might have idolized him…

But that is the way it is, and good thing it is!

Behold, looking at the pages of Orthodoxy, I get irritated. Then, however, I exalt myself.

And the summary of my judgment, after the calm of the reflections, is this: great reading! Because that is what great readings leave: strong impressions.

So we are going to dig into them, expose what stirred me up in this great work. Chesterton begins:

The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums. (…) If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can’t act believe in themselves; and debtors who won’t pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly…