Quote Of The Day: Happy Contradictions

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Quote Of The Day #81

He was an expert in contradictory phrases. For example he would say:

“We have no happiness chiefly because we are always looking for happiness.”

“he is looking for an honest man, and I am afraid he has very little time to be honest himself”

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms–it means a strong desire to live while taking the form of a readiness to die.”

Pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives a roaring trade of (being popular). It is the optimist who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good (life is).

You see G. K. Chesterton can be quite delightful if he chooses to be, although I have to say his notion on women’s voting rights and social equality is very atrocious. I read a little bit of his essays only because I don’t know what to read. Often I don’t even know what I like. Most of the time reading is just a hit or miss.

Years ago, I tried to read his “Father Brown” series since it was said to be good, but I disliked it very much and couldn’t finish even ten pages. Even my youthful enthusiasm in torturing myself in order to improve myself couldn’t persuade me to read more. So I gave up on the book and the author. I thought to myself that as a non-native speaker, I really couldn’t see how the native speakers could like this book. The native speakers’ aesthetics and tastes had been a mystery to me in many instances, and this was one of them.

Then years later, I stumbled on several pages he wrote as an introduction to a book of an author of the early 20th century. They are written so well that I wanted to read more of the introduction than the actual book. So the strength of his writing is not in “Father Brown” but in something else. I remembered that I had gone through the same thing with several other authors, whose popular books didn’t appeal to me but whose not-so-popular books were very appealing.

I was trying to create some imitations of his contradictory phrases, but couldn’t manage it. Life is full of contradictions, from which we can extract some aphorism. However under the pressure, I can’t come up with anything other than some cliches.