Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.

We're all in the same boat, and we're all seasick.

It's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse; it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them.

The noble temptation to see too much in everything.

I am not fighting a hopeless fight. People who have fought in real fights don't, as a rule.

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

The difficulty of explaining ‘why I am a Catholic’ is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.

...It's natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things.

That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face - that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.

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

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.

People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.

Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live.

Romance is the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure.

I do not believe that any human being is fundamentally happier for being finally lost in a crowd, even if it is called a crowd of comrades.

It was the people who did not care who filled the world with fire and oppression. It was the hands of the indifferent that lit the faggots; it was the hands of the indifferent that turned the rack.

I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is.

What are we going to do?" asked the Professor. "At this moment," said Syme, with a scientific detachment, "I think we are going to smash into a lamppost.

What is the good of words if they aren't important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn't any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn't there be a quarrel about a word? If you're not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about? Are you going to convey your meaning to me by moving your ears? The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only thing worth fighting about.

What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another.

All the controversialists who have become conscious of the real issue are already saying of our ideal exactly what used to be said of the Socialists' ideal. They are saying that private property is too ideal not to be impossible. They are saying that private enterprise is too good to be true. They are saying that the idea of ordinary men owning ordinary possessions is against the laws of political economy and requires an alteration in human nature.

People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.

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.

I represent the jolly mass of mankind. I am the happy and reckless Christian.

Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other's.

Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity.

What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible.

Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which your are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. ... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal and that you are a paralytic.

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.

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

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.

The Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, they now talk unscientifically about science.

The martyr endured tortures to affirm his belief in truth but he never asserted his disbelief in torture.

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

Mr. Blatchford says that there was not a Fall but a gradual rise. But the very word "rise" implies that you know toward what you are rising. Unless there is a standard you cannot tell whether you are rising or falling. But the main point is that the Fall like every other large path of Christianity is embodied in the common language talked on the top of an omnibus. Anybody might say, "Very few men are really Manly." Nobody would say, "Very few whales are really whaley."

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

Variability is one of the virtues of a woman. It avoids the crude requirement of polygamy. So long as you have one good wife you are sure to have a spiritual harem".

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

The wise old fairy tales never were so silly as to say that the prince and the princess lived peacefully ever afterwards. The fairy tales said that the prince and princess lived happily ever afterwards; and so they did. They lived happily, although it is very likely that from time to time they threw the furniture at each other.

We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.

The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the well-being of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.

How quickly revolutions grow old; and, worse still, respectable.

The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.

A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

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.

The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star.

Christianity, whatever else it is, is an explosion. Unless it is sensational there is simply no sense in it. Unless the Gospel sounds like a gun going off it has not been uttered at all.