Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

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.

The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason.

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.

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.

In anything that does cover the whole of your life - in your philosophy and your religion - you must have mirth. If you do not have mirth you will certainly have madness.

All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told.

I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much.

Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.

I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.

One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it.

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.

These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

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.

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German.

There is only one reason an intelligent person doesn't believe in miracles. He or she believes in materialism.

A man must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions if he is not even ready to wear a wreathe around his head for them.

If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing keep behind him.

Our civilization has decided that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.

At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper. . . .

For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value of any of them is that they bear the image of the king.

Hell is God's great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.

We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves.

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.

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

There are no boring subjects, only disinterested minds.

And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.

Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists.

We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.

You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.

I will go forth as a real outlaw," he said, "and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway; and it will be counted a wilder crime.

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

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

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

Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.

Not only does "orthodox" no longer mean being right, it practically means being wrong.

To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not sure about being quiet.

Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.

The real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.