Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride.

Christmas is built upon a beautiful and intentional paradox; that the birth of the homeless should be celebrated in every home.

There are two kinds of peacemakers in the modern world; and they are both, though in various ways, a nuisance. The first peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that he agrees with everybody. He confuses everybody. The second peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that everybody agrees with him. He enrages everybody. Between the two of them they produce a hundred times more disputes and distractions than we poor pugnacious people would ever have thought of in our lives.

The fact is that purification and austerity are even more necessary for the appreciation of life and laughter than for anything else. To let no bird fly past unnoticed, to spell the stones and weeds, to have the mind a storehouse of sunset, requires a discipline in pleasure and an education in gratitude.

The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything.

All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them.

And we were angry and poor and happy, And proud of seeing our names in print.

Were Patrick Henry to return to earth and look around on the vast economic order of the day, he might revise his observation and merely say ‘Give me death’-the alternative being manifestly impossible under modern conditions.

A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher.

I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.

Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news.

I have argued with him on almost every subject in the world, and we have always been on opposite sides, without affectation or animosity... It is necessary to disagree with him as much as I do, in order to admire him as I do; and I am proud of him as a foe even more than as a friend.

We are learning to do a great many clever things. The next great task will be to learn not to do them.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.

When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.

I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.

There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.

It is the simple truth that man does differ from the brutes in kind and not in degree; and the proof of it is here; that it sounds like a truism to say that the most primitive man drew a picture of a monkey and that it sounds like a joke to say that the most intelligent monkey drew a picture of a man. Something of division and disproportion has appeared; and it is unique. Art is the signature of man.

Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.

There are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place; as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place; as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes or other normal amusements of mankind.

A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.

If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments

We are all ordinary people. And it's the extraordinary people Who know it.

None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.

children are simply human beings who are allowed to do what everyone else really desires to do, as for instance, to fly kites, or when seriously wronged to emit prolonged screams for several minutes.

Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

Tolerance is the virtue of those who don't believe anything.

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

I defy anybody to say what are the rights of a citizen, if they do not include the control of his own diet in relation to his own health.

All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost.

It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground.

You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose.

Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.

But they none of them create the psychological conditions in which I first saw, or desired to see, the flower.

God is like the sun; you cannot look at it, but without it you cannot look at anything else.

Most Americans are born drunk, and really require a little wine or beer to sober them.

I've searched all the parks in all the cities - and found no statues of Committees.

Gratitude produced the most purely joyful moments that have been known to man.

I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves? For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

My brother, Cecil Edward Chesterton, was born when I was about five years old; and, after a brief pause, began to argue. He continued to argue to the end. I am glad to think that through all those years we never stopped arguing; and we never once quarreled. Perhaps the principal objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument.