Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

There are two kinds of charlatan: the man who is called a charlatan, and the man who really is one. The first is the quack who cures you; the second is the highly qualified person who doesn't.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - 'free-love' - as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.

Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. Unless a man starts on the strange assumption that he has never existed before, it is quite certain that he will never exist afterwards.

That all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict, there would be no difference between a torturer and a surgeon. There are certain intellectuals who are too bright to be content with merely praising peace but who are infuriated by anybody praising war. If no war is possible, all criminality has its chance

Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.

London is a riddle. Paris is an explanation.

If Christianity should happen to be true - that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe - then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything.

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men no having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being.

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

The woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn’t obeyed.

Every one on the earth should believe that he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise be given.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

There are arguments for atheism, and they do not depend, and never did depend, upon science. They are arguable enough, as far as they go, upon a general survey of life; only it happens to be a superficial survey of life.

Science boasts of the distance of its stars; of the terrific remoteness of the things of which it has to speak. But poetry and religion always insist upon the proximity, the almost menacing closeness of the things with which they are concerned. Always the Kingdom of Heaven is "At Hand."

All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.

[Consider] a fence or gate erected across a road] The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."

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

A feminist is someone who loathes being a woman and who dislikes the chief feminine characteristics.

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

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

A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it.

Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, 'We will not be dictated to,' and went off and became stenographers.

A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.

Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.

Most Americans ... have a sort of permanent intoxication from within, a sort of invisible champagne.

We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them.

There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing badly. (on not perfectionism to put things off) .

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

Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.

The position we have now reached is this: starting from the State, we try to remedy the failures of all the families, all the nurseries, all the schools, all the workshops, all the secondary institutions that once had some authority of their own. Everything is ultimately brought into the Law Courts. We are trying to stop the leak at the other end.

We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

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.

They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.

That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

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

Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my childlike faith in practical politics.

The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know they are dogmas.

White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.