The Project Gutenberg Project

Let no man deceive himself; if by vulgarity we mean coarseness of speech, rowdiness of behaviour, gossip, horseplay, and some heavy drinking, vulgarity there always was wherever there was joy, wherever there was faith in the gods. Wherever you have belief you will have hilarity, wherever you have hilarity you will have some dangers. And as creed and mythology produce this gross and vigorous life, so in its turn this gross and vigorous life will always produce creed and mythology. 

- G.K. Chesterton, ‘Christmas and the Aesthetes’ (1905) in Heretics [full text]

In the round of our rational and mournful year one festival remains out of all those ancient gaieties that once covered the whole earth. Christmas remains to remind us of those ages, whether Pagan or Christian, when the many acted poetry instead of the few writing it.

- G.K. Chesterton, ‘Christmas and the Aesthetes’ (1905) in Heretics [full text]

Clodagh looked up, colouring afresh; and the young man bowed quickly and eagerly. He belonged to a type new to her, but familiar to every social Londoner: the type of young Englishman who, gifted with unusual height and fine possibilities of muscular development, saunters through life—physically and morally—exerting his energy and his strength in one direction only—the eternal, aimless, enervating search after personal pleasure.

To be explicit, the Honourable Valentine Serracauld was suffering from that most modern of complaints—the lack of surmountable obstacles.

- Katherine Cecil Thurston, The Gambler (1905) [full text]

He reviewed his own calm, if somewhat lonely, manhood; his aimless delving first into one branch of learning, then into another; his gradually dawning interest in the study of archaeology—an interest that, fostered by ample leisure and ample means, had become the temperate and well-ordered passion of his life.

- Katherine Cecil Thurston, The Gambler (1905) [full text]

A philosopher has noted that at certain periods a great many stupid people have a good deal of stupid money. This condition, describable as plethora, is succeeded by another catalogued as panic.

- Edgar Saltus, The Perfume of Eros: A Fifth Avenue Incident (1905) [full text]