Quotes About Chesterton

#1. All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#2. Millions of women rose up, said G. K. Chesterton, to declare that they would no longer be dictated to, and promptly became stenographers.

Anthony Esolen

#3. No man who worships education has got the best out of education ... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

G.K. Chesterton

#4. Dear Sir: Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?' I am. Yours truly,

G.K. Chesterton

#5. Eugenics, as discussed, evidently means the control of some men
over the marriage and unmarriage of others; and probably means the
control of the few over the marriage and unmarriage of the many

G.K. Chesterton

#6. I have a suspicion that you are all mad,' said Dr. Renard, smiling sociably; 'but God forbid that madness should in any way interrupt friendship.

G.K. Chesterton

#7. Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

G.K. Chesterton

#8. It is ludicrous to suppose that the more sceptical we are the more we see good in everything. It is clear that the more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything.

G.K. Chesterton

#9. In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities ... it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.

G.K. Chesterton

#10. The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#11. A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.

G.K. Chesterton

#12. But since he stood for England And knew what England means, Unless you give him bacon You must not give him beans.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#13. Let a man walk ten miles steadily on a hot summer's day along a dusty English road, and he will soon discover why beer was invented.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#14. And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke.

G.K. Chesterton

#15. That wild word, "Moor Eeffoc," is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle - the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact.

G.K. Chesterton

#16. 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

#17. I am sure that if triangles ever were loved, they were loved for being triangular.

G.K. Chesterton

#18. The danger of loss of faith in God is not that one will believe in nothing, but rather that one will believe in anything.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#19. Our age is obviously the Nonsense Age; the wiser sort of nonsense being provided for the children and the sillier sort of nonsense for the grown-up people.

G.K. Chesterton

#20. If a rhinoceros were to enter this restaurant now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I should be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever.

G.K. Chesterton

#21. Agnostic is the Greek word, for the Latin word, for ignorant

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#22. What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.

G.K. Chesterton

#23. We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#24. It might be questioned whether hammering is more of a strain on the attention because it may go on for ever, or because it may stop at any minute.

G.K. Chesterton

#25. There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.

G.K. Chesterton

#26. The primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

G.K. Chesterton

#27. It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.

G.K. Chesterton

#28. Architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#29. I should favour anything that would increase the present enormous authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The average woman ... is a despot; the average man is a serf.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#30. A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.

G.K. Chesterton

#31. In every society, the rich are the scum of the earth.

G.K. Chesterton

#32. The big corporation is not in the least remarkable for efficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#33. A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#34. When we consider the possibility that God will not be good to us, we stand on the precipice of despair and peer into the darkness below.

G.K. Chesterton

#35. All women dress to be noticed: gross and vulgar women to be grossly and vulgarly noticed, wise and modest women to be wisely and modestly noticed.

G.K. Chesterton

#36. The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#37. There is no logical connection between flying and laying eggs.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#38. You've only talked like that since you became a horrid what's-his-name. You know what I mean. What do you call a man who wants to embrace the chimney-sweep?" "A saint," said Father Brown. "I think," said Sir Leopold, with a supercilious smile, "that Ruby means a Socialist.

G.K. Chesterton

#39. Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#40. The hardest thing to remember about our time, of course, is simply that it is a time- we all instinctively think of it as the Day of Judgment.

G.K. Chesterton

#41. Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.

G.K. Chesterton

#42. The truth is people who worship health cannot remain healthy on the point.

G.K. Chesterton

#43. Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.

G.K. Chesterton

#44. Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

G.K. Chesterton

#45. Perfectly," replied Syme; "always be comic in a tragedy.

G.K. Chesterton

#46. True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#47. Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance.

G.K. Chesterton

#48. What is the good of a man being honest in his worship of dishonesty?

G.K. Chesterton

#49. Research is the search of people who don't know what they want.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#50. We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.

G.K. Chesterton

#51. The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#52. It's not the world that's got so much worse but the news coverage that's got so much better.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#53. Is that story really true?" he asked. "Oh, no," said Michael, airily. "It is a parable. It is a parable of you and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the Cross; but you end by breaking up the habitable world.

G.K. Chesterton

#54. We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity.

G.K. Chesterton

#55. Every work of art has one indispensable mark ... the center of it is simple, however much the fulfillment may be complicated.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#56. The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times.

G.K. Chesterton

#57. But it is clear that no political activity can be encouraged by saying that progress is natural and inevitable; that is not a reason for being active, but rather a reason for being lazy.

G.K. Chesterton

#58. Christianity came in here as before. It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another. It divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all. It

G.K. Chesterton

#59. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.

G.K. Chesterton

#60. Daybreak is a never-ending glory; getting out of bed is a never ending nuisance.

G.K. Chesterton

#61. You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#62. There is only one good thing science ever discovered - a good thing, good tidings of great joy - that the world is round.

G.K. Chesterton

#63. Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#64. The real objection to modernism is simply that it is a form of snobbishness. It is an attempt to crush a rational opponent not by reason, but by some mystery of superiority, by hinting that one is specially up to date or particularly in the know.

G.K. Chesterton

#65. Goo-goo goo-goo goo-goo goo
Goo-goo goo-goo goo-goo
Googly, googly, googly goo:
That's how we fill a column.

G.K. Chesterton

#66. 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

#67. In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#68. Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#69. There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#70. Saint George he was for England, And before he killed the dragon he drank a pint of English ale out of an English flagon.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#71. You'll never find the solution if you don't see the problem.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#72. The hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#73. In other words, we may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.

G.K. Chesterton

#74. What on earth is the current morality, except in its literal sense - the morality that is always running away?

G.K. Chesterton

#75. Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#76. As long as matters are really hopeful," wrote Chesterton, "hope is mere flattery or platitude. It is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all the Christian virtues, it is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.

Eugene H. Peterson

#77. We can't turn life into a pleasure. But we can choose such pleasures as are worthy of us and our immortal souls.

G.K. Chesterton

#78. me an explanation, first, of the towering eccentricity of man among the brutes; second, of the vast human tradition of some ancient happiness; third, of the partial perpetuation of such pagan joy

G.K. Chesterton

#79. The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand but lets the gold go free
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

G.K. Chesterton

#80. The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#81. When the chord of monotony is stretched to its tightest, it breaks with the sound of a song.

G.K. Chesterton

#82. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return to at evening.

G.K. Chesterton

#83. Pagans were wiser then paganism; that is why the pagans became Christians.

G.K. Chesterton

#84. By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#85. I could forgive you even your cruelty if it were not for your calm.

G.K. Chesterton

#86. If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#87. Gentlemen used to lie just as schoolboys lie, because they hung together and partly to help one another out.

G.K. Chesterton

#88. G. K. Chesterton once said, 'Fairy tales are more than true, not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.'" She

Claire Stibbe

#89. As to the doubt of the soul I discover it to be false: a mood not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A thing, not a theory. It.

G.K. Chesterton

#90. Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#91. History is not a toboggan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#92. 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

#93. Modesty is always beautiful

G.K. Chesterton

#94. Though I believe in liberalism, I find it difficult to believe in liberals.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#95. The cross cannot be defeated for it is defeat.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#96. The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#97. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

G.K. Chesterton

#98. A puddle repeats infinity, and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud.

G.K. Chesterton

#99. I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position at this moment.

G.K. Chesterton

#100. The real difference between Francis and Dominic, which is no discredit to either of them, is that Dominic did happen to be confronted with a huge campaign for the conversion of heretics, while Francis had only the more subtle task of the conversion of human beings.

G.K. Chesterton