Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly; we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.

Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.

Leaving the complications of the human breakfast-table out of account, in an elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable in himself.

I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity.

I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.

Thanks are the highest form of thought.

Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?

Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.

The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.

There is more to life than increasing its speed. Gandhi gave my life to become the person I am right now. Was it worth it? Richard Bach Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.

If you'd take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can't say. But it might.

The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.

Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek.

The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.

To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.

Is there anyone... who will maintain that the Party System could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?

The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.

The hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded.

He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.

The human race is always trying this dodge of making everything entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts off one thing it shifts to another.

Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all... As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength.

The things we see every day are the things we never see at all.

The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity is more touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope for all things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large and lustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; their fascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint of the humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.

It is because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to reverently worship the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion.

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present.

It is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counter-irri-tants to each other.

St Thomas (Aqinas) loved books and lived on books... When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, ‘I have understood every page I ever read’.

Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

There are no new ideas about female education.

Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.

Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.

The Church is a house with a hundred gates: and no two men enter at exactly the same angle

We are like the penny, because we have the image of the king stamped on us, the divine king.

Truths turn into dogmas the minute they are disputed.

A really great person is the person who makes every person feel great.

Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny and nothing else.

It is human to err; and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.

The test of happiness is gratitude.

The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.

When a man ceases to believe in god, he does not believe in nothing. He believes in everything.

Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.

Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.