Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“ There is no rich and fickle man who does not feel that all his novelties are ancient. There is no worshipper of change who does not feel upon his neck the vast weight of the weariness of the universe. But we who do the old things are fed by nature with a perpetual infancy. No man who is in love thinks that any one has been in love before. No woman who has a child thinks that there have been such things as children. No people that fight for their own city are haunted with the burden of the broken empires. Yes, oh dark voice, the world is always the same, for it is always unexpected. ”

“ Men live, as I say, rejoicing from age to age in something fresher than progress—in the fact that with every baby a new sun and a new moon are made. If our ancient humanity were a single man, it might perhaps be that he would break down under the memory of so many loyalties, under the burden of so many diverse heroisms, under the load and terror of all the goodness of men. ”

“ But in healthy people there is no war between us. We are but the two lobes of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend at the friend. Auberon Quin, we have been too long separated, let us go out together. You have a halberd and I a sword, let us start our wanderings over the world. ”

“ It is not merely that I, the fanatic, have had to grope without humour. It is that though we seem to be opposite in everything, we have been opposite like man and woman, aiming at the same moment at the same practical thing. We are the father and the mother of the Charter of the Cities."
Quin looked down at the débris of leaves and timber, the relics of the battle and stampede, now glistening in the glowing daylight, and finally said—
"Yet nothing can alter the antagonism—the fact that I laughed at these things and you adored them." ”

“ The equal and eternal human being will alter that antagonism, for the human being sees no real antagonism between laughter and respect, the human being, the common man, whom mere geniuses like you and me, can only worship like a god. ”

“ We are mad, because we are two lobes of the same brain, and that brain has been cloven in two. And if you ask for the proof of it, it is not hard to find. It is not merely that you, the humourist, have been in these dark days stripped of the joy of gravity. ”

“ But it has pleased God so to isolate the individual soul that it can only learn of all other souls by hearsay, and to each one goodness and happiness come with the youth and violence of lightning, as momentary and as pure. And the doom of failure that lies on all human systems does not in real fact affect them any more than the worms of the inevitable grave affect a children's game hi a meadow. ”

“ When dark and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace. ”

“ Then a voice spoke out of the darkness, no one could have told from where, and said aloud—
"So ends the Empire of Notting Hill. As it began in blood, so it ended in blood, and all things are always the same."
And there was silence again, and then again there was a voice, but it had not the same tone; it seemed that it was not the same voice.
"If all things are always the same, it is because they are always heroic. If all things are always the same, it is because they are always new. To each man one soul only is given ”