Top 100 G.K. Chesterton Quotes
#1. In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities ... it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.
G.K. Chesterton
#2. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.
G.K. Chesterton
#3. It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.
G.K. Chesterton
#4. I scarcely ever," he said, with an unconscious and colossal arrogance, "hear of anything on the face of the earth that I do not understand at once, without going to see it." And he led the way out into the purple night.
The Club of Queer Trades
G.K. Chesterton
#5. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
G.K. Chesterton
#6. The oligarchic character of the modern English commonwealth does not rest, like many oligarchies, on the cruelty of the rich to the poor. It does not even rest on the kindness of the rich to the poor. It rests on the perennial and unfailing kindness of the poor to the rich.
G.K. Chesterton
#7. It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.
G.K. Chesterton
#8. To these things do writers sink; and then the critics tell them that they "talk for effect"; and then the writers answer: "What the devil else should we talk for? Ineffectualness?
G.K. Chesterton
#9. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
G.K. Chesterton
#10. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians.
G.K. Chesterton
#11. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?
G.K. Chesterton
#12. In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation - it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise 1 in the primer of minor poetry.
G.K. Chesterton
#13. I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.
G.K. Chesterton
#14. We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.
G.K. Chesterton
#15. Just the other day in the Underground I enjoyed the pleasure of offering my seat to three ladies.
G.K. Chesterton
#16. I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.
G.K. Chesterton
#17. Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.
G.K. Chesterton
#18. What is the good of begetting a man until we have settled what is the good of being a man?
G.K. Chesterton
#19. The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: that
people do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it may
or may not be right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivably
be right to kill a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man.
G.K. Chesterton
#21. For with any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation. There comes a certain point in such conditions when only three things are possible: first a perpetuation of Satanic pride, secondly tears, and third laughter.
G.K. Chesterton
#22. We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot.
G.K. Chesterton
#23. Of the last two friends of yours who had the modern mind; one thought it wrong to eat fishes and the other thought it right to eat men ...
G.K. Chesterton
#24. Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung;
The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.
G.K. Chesterton
#25. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.
G.K. Chesterton
#26. How quickly revolutions grow old; and, worse still, respectable.
G.K. Chesterton
#27. The pessimist can be enraged at wrong; but only the optimist can be surprised at it.
G.K. Chesterton
#28. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered. - On Running After Ones Hat, All Things Considered, 1908
G.K. Chesterton
#29. He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
G.K. Chesterton
#30. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.
G.K. Chesterton
#31. We must not hate humanity, or despise humanity, or refuse to help humanity; but we must not trust humanity; in the sense of trusting a trend in human nature which cannot turn back to bad things.
G.K. Chesterton
#32. A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
G.K. Chesterton
#33. It is to be feared that about a hundred detective stories have begun with the discovery that an American millionaire has been murdered; an event which is, for some reason, treated as a sort of calamity.
G.K. Chesterton
#34. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.
G.K. Chesterton
#35. You see," said Father Brown in low but easy tone, "Scotch people before Scotland existed were a curious lot. In fact, they're a curious lot still. But in the prehistoric times I fancy they really worshipped demons. That," he added genially, "is why they jumped at the Puritan theology.
G.K. Chesterton
#36. 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.
G.K. Chesterton
#37. A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.
G.K. Chesterton
#38. We are in this fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world.
G.K. Chesterton
#39. Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments.
G.K. Chesterton
#40. The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.
G.K. Chesterton
#41. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.
G.K. Chesterton
#42. In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was quite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in crowds down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high post in the State.
G.K. Chesterton
#43. It seems to me a very real problem, to which I have never seen an answer even such as I shall attempt here, why a democracy should produce fads; and why, where there is so genuine a sense of human dignity, there should be so much of an impossible petty tyranny.
G.K. Chesterton
#44. The reader cannot even begin to see the sense of a story that may well seem to him a very wild one, until he understands that to this great mystic his religion was not a thing like a theory but a thing like a love-affair.
G.K. Chesterton
#46. No sceptical philosopher can ask any questions that may not equally be asked by a tired child on a hot afternoon.
G.K. Chesterton
#47. A breeze blew so clean and sweet, that one could not think that it blew from the sky; it blew rather through some hole in the sky.
G.K. Chesterton
#49. Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live.
G.K. Chesterton
#50. Christian marriage is the great example of a real and irrevocable result; and that is why it is the chief subject and centre of all our romantic writing.
G.K. Chesterton
#51. Happiness is a state of the soul; a state in which our natures are full of the wine of an ancient youth, in which banquets last for ever, and roads lead everywhere, where all things are under the exuberant leadership of faith, hope, and charity.
G.K. Chesterton
#52. A saint is long past any desire for distinction; he is the only sort of superior man who has never been a superior person.
G.K. Chesterton
#53. Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means. Even the fastidious and unhappy who cannot read his books without a continuous critical exasperation, would use the word of him without stopping to think. They feel that Dickens is a great writer even if he is not a good writer.
G.K. Chesterton
#54. Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe anything.
G.K. Chesterton
#55. Being a nation means standing up to your equals, whereas being an empire only means kicking your inferiors.
G.K. Chesterton
#56. So strong is tradition that later generations will dream of what they have never seen.
G.K. Chesterton
#57. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.
G.K. Chesterton
#58. Is," said Syme serenely, "the truth is I am a Sabbatarian.
G.K. Chesterton
#59. All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.
G.K. Chesterton
#60. Thieves respect property; they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.
G.K. Chesterton
#61. There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.
G.K. Chesterton
#62. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.
G.K. Chesterton
#63. We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.
G.K. Chesterton
#64. Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.
G.K. Chesterton
#65. The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand.
G.K. Chesterton
#66. If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.
G.K. Chesterton
#67. The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
G.K. Chesterton
#69. The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, The Odyssey because all life is a journey, The Book of Job because all life is a riddle.
G.K. Chesterton
#70. The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity.
G.K. Chesterton
#71. You cannot evade the issue of God, whether you are talking about pigs or the binomial theory ... Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.
G.K. Chesterton
#72. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature.
G.K. Chesterton
#73. The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.
G.K. Chesterton
#74. In a word, mythology is a search; it is something that combines a recurrent desire with a recurrent doubt, mixing
G.K. Chesterton
#75. I would give a woman not more rights, but more privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and factories, I would design specially a house in which she can be free.
G.K. Chesterton
#76. why, nobody's ever survived it! Look at all the people married since Adam and Eve - and all as dead as mutton.
G.K. Chesterton
#77. I did, indeed, retain a cloudy reverence for a cosmic deity and a great historical interest in the Founder of Christianity. But I certainly regarded Him as a man; though perhaps I thought that, even in that point, He had an advantage over some of His modern critics.
G.K. Chesterton
#78. Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy.
G.K. Chesterton
#79. He seemed like a walking blasphemy, a blend of the angel and the ape.
G.K. Chesterton
#80. The men of the east may search the scrolls,
For sure fates and fame,
But the men that drink the blood of God go singing to their shame.
G.K. Chesterton
#81. The old idealistic republicans used to found democracy on the idea that all men were equally intelligent. Believe me, the sane and enduring democracy is founded on the fact that all men are equally idiotic.
G.K. Chesterton
#82. And when he became conscious of a human figure dark against the silver stream, sitting on a large boulder and looking rather like a large bird, it was perhaps with some of the premonitions proper to a man who meets the strangest friendship of his life.
G.K. Chesterton
#83. Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
G.K. Chesterton
#84. the modern return to heathenism has been a return not even to the heathen youth but rather to the heathen old age. But
G.K. Chesterton
#85. To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
G.K. Chesterton
#86. He has a fancy for always sitting in a pitch-dark room. He says it makes his thoughts brighter.
G.K. Chesterton
#87. But if I want to murder somebody, will it really be the best plan to make sure I'm alone with him?'
Lord Pooley's eyes recovered their frosty twinkle as he looked at the little clergyman. He only said: 'If you want to murder somebody, I should advise it.
G.K. Chesterton
#88. All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But ... if you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
G.K. Chesterton
#89. Believe me, you never know the best about men till you know the worst about them.
G.K. Chesterton
#90. The whole imaginative effort of Walt Whitman was really an effort to absorb and animate these multitudinous modern repetitions; and Walt Whitman would be quite capable of including in his lyric litany of optimism a list of the nine hundred and ninety-nine identical bathrooms.
G.K. Chesterton
#91. The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really this proposition: that nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover she is a step-mother.
G.K. Chesterton
#92. The moderns say we must not punish heretics. My only doubt is whether we have the right to punish anybody else.
G.K. Chesterton
#93. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.
G.K. Chesterton
#94. Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.
G.K. Chesterton
#95. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed.
G.K. Chesterton
#96. We may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting.
G.K. Chesterton
#97. I am not good at deception,' said Tuesday gloomily, flushing.
Right, my boy, right,' said the President with a ponderous heartiness, 'You aren't good at anything.
G.K. Chesterton
#98. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays.
G.K. Chesterton
#99. Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.
G.K. Chesterton
#100. But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind.
G.K. Chesterton
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