Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The old idea that the joke was not good enough for the company has been superseded by the new aristocratic idea that the company was not worthy of the joke. They have introduced an almost insane individualism into that one form of intercourse which is specially and uproariously communal. They have made even levities into secrets. They have made laughter lonelier than tears.

Men spoke much in my boyhood about restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it's a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.

I don't need a church to tell me I'm wrong where I already know I'm wrong; I need a Church to tell me I'm wrong where I think I'm right

Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.

No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalised.

If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

For the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present discussions - the idea of property... Property is merely the art of the democracy... One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are enemies of their own limitations.

Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion.

He walked by instinct along one white road, on which early birds hopped and sang, and found himself outside a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.

Everyone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes are generally honest. Complete solemnity is almost always dishonest. The writer of the snippet merely refers to a frivolous and fugitive fact in a frivolous and fugitive way. The writer of the leading article has to write about a fact he has known for 20 minutes as though he has studied it for 20 years.

Time and again, the Faith has to all appearances gone to the dogs. But each time, it was the dog that died.

And though St. John saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.

As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.

No animal ever invented anything as bad as drunkenness - or so good as drink.

I still hold. . .that the suburbs ought to be either glorified by romance and religion or else destroyed by fire from heaven, or even by firebrands from the earth.

In all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.

Thinking in isolation and with pride ends in being an idiot.

There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners.

There are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.

The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in the modern philosophy the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously artistic and emancipated; its despair is within.

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall of man, they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now they talk about the survival of the fittest: they think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean.

The Catholic Church is the only thing that saves man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.

The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.

Architecture is the alphabet of giants; it is the largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men. A tower stands up like a sort of simplified stature, of much more than heroic size.

If an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing.

humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle

There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness.

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.

How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos.

Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil.

The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.

All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable.

It has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the long Vision we call life... "It is good for us to be here - it is good for us to be here", repeating itself eternally.

The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar.

These are the things which might conceivably and truly make men forgive their enemies. We can only turn hate to love by understanding what are the things that men have loved; nor is it necessary to ask men to hate their loves in order to love one another. Just as two grocers are most likely to be reconciled when they remember for a moment that they are two fathers, so two nationals are most likely to be reconciled when they remember (if only for a moment) that they are two patriots.

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break.

Atheism is too theological.

The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything.

Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.

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

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.

You never know the best about men until you know the worst about them.

Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.