St Francis of Assisi by GK Chesterton

[opening page]
"... the full and final spirit in which we should turn to St Francis [is] in the spirit of thanks for what he has done. He was above all things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving. If another great man wrote a grammar of assent, he may well be said to have written a grammar of acceptance; a grammar of gratitude. He understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss. He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing. He knew that we can best measure the towering miracle of the mere fact of existence if we realise that but for some strange mercy we should not even exist..."

p.15 He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a lover. He was a lover of God and he was truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation. A lover of men is very nearly the opposite of a philanthropist; indeed the pedantry of the Greek word carries something like a satire on itself.

p.26 [The end of the Midle Ages] was the end of a penance; or, if it be preferred, a purgation. It marked the moment when a certain spiritual expiation had been finally worked out and certain spiritual diseases had been finally expelled from the system. They had been expelled by an era of asceticism, whih was the only thing that could have expelled them

p.47 He liked as he liked; he seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking

p.57 He realised thatthe way to build a church is not to become entangled in bargains and, to him, rather bewildering questions of legal claim. The way to build a church is not to pay for it, certainly not with somebody else's money. The way to build a church is not even to pay for it with your own money. The way to build a church is to build it.

p.58 He was truly building up something else, or beginning to build it up; something that has often enough fallen into ruin but has never been past rebuilding; a church that could always be built anew though it had rotted away to its first foundation-stone, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail.

p.78 He who has seen the whole world hanging on a hair of the mercy of God has seen the truth; we might almost say the cold truth.

p.80 ...We are not generous enough to be ascetics; one might almost say not genial enough to be ascetics. A man must have magnanimity of surrender, of which he commonly only only catches a glimpse in first love, like a glimpse of our lost Eden.

p.81 He devoured fasting as a man devours food. He plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for gold.

p.103 It was the whole calculation, so to speak, of that innocent cunning, that theworld was to be outflanked and outwitted by him, and be embarrassed about what to do with him. You could not threaten to starve a man who was ever striving to fast. You could not ruin him and reduce him to beggary, for he was already a beggar...You could not put his head in a halter without the risk of putting it in a halo.

p.128 There may be something in the suggestion that the holy man was unconsciously protected among half-barbarous Orientals by the halo of sanctity that is supposed in such places to surround an idiot...Finally, there is perhaps something in the suggestion thatthe tale of St Francis might be told as a sort of ironic tragedy and comedy called The Man Who Could Not Get Killed.

p.152 St Francis walked the world like the Pardon of God

p.156 He understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss. He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing