Top 100 Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes
#2. Every work of art has one indispensable mark ... the center of it is simple, however much the fulfillment may be complicated.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#4. A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying, 'Of course I do not like green cheese. I am very fond of brown sherry.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#5. Americans are a very backward people, with all the real virtues of a backward people; the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#8. The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#9. A great curse has fallen upon modern life with the discovery of the vastness of the word Education.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#10. Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#11. Your next-door neighbor is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a piano; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#12. It is very good for a man to talk about what he does not understand; as long as he understands that he does not understand it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#13. One pleasure attached to growing older is that many things seem to be growing younger; growing fresher and more lively than we once supposed them to be.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#15. Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#16. Before the Roman came to Rye or out to severn strode, / The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#18. A good Moslem king was one who was strict in religion, valiant in battle, just in giving judgment among his people, but not one who had the slightest objection in international matters to removing his neighbour's landmark.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#19. Men are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#21. Whatever else we may say of our own age, for good or evil, nobody is likely to call it an Age of Reason.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#22. A third-class carriage is a community, while a first-class carriage is a place of wild hermits.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#23. [A pacifist is] the last and least excusable on the list of the enemies of society.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#24. The miser is the man who starves himself and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#27. The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#28. I am a bad reporter because everything seems to me worth reporting; and a bad reviewer because every sentence in every book suggests a separate essay.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#29. The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#30. Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#32. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#33. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly. (on not perfectionism to put things off) .
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#36. Original sin is the only doctrine that's been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#37. As an explanation of the world materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has the quality of a madman's arguments; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#38. Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#39. Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#40. Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#41. The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully interferes.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#43. Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex (female) superiority that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#44. When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#45. Children are simply human beings who are allowed to do what everyone else really desires to do, as for instance, to fly kites, or when seriously wronged to emit prolonged screams for several minutes.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#46. Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#47. Sticking to one woman is a small price to pay for so much as having seen one woman.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#48. Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#50. Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be. You may have all the solemnity you wish in your neckties, but in anything important (such as sex, death, and religion), you must have mirth or you will have madness.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#52. Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#54. The evolutionists seem to know everything about the missing link except the fact that it is missing.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#56. Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#57. Mankind is not a tribe of animals to which we owe compassion. Mankind is a club to which we owe our subscription.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#60. Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#61. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic
ignorance.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#62. Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#63. The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#65. Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their strength in forging chains for themselves.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#66. This is, first and last, the real value of Christmas; in so far as the mythology remains at all it is a kind of happy mythology. Personally, of course, I believe in Santa Claus; but it is the season of forgiveness, and I will forgive others for not doing so.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#68. It is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#74. Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#75. War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#76. Whatever else may be said of man, this one thing is clear: He is not what he is capable of being.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#77. The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#78. The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#81. Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#82. The world will very soon be divided, unless I am mistaken, into those who still go on explaining our success, and those somewhat more intelligent who are trying to explain our failure.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#83. It is unpardonable conceit not to laugh at your own jokes. Joking is undignified; that is why it is so good for one's soul. Do not fancy you can be a detached wit and avoid being a buffoon; you cannot. If you are the Court Jester you must be the Court Fool.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#84. It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men, such as General Gordon, have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#85. It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#86. The Universe is the most extraordinary masterpiece ever constructed by nobody.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#87. We are like the penny, because we have the image of the king stamped on us, the divine king.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#88. Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#89. The great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All goods look better when they look like gifts.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#90. One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#92. If our caricaturists do not hate their enemies, it is not because they are too big to hate them, but because their enemies are not big enough to hate.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#93. Being 'contented' ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#97. Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#98. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#99. The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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