Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

There nearly always is a method in madness.

An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough.

I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do— I can die.

...a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles.

I believe your own accent is inimitable, though I shall practice it in my bath.

The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand.

There is no bigot like the atheist.

Contemporary society has become dry, not for lack of wonders but for lack of wonder.

If the world grows to worldly, it can be rebuked by the Church; but if the Church grows to worldly, it cannot be adequately rebuked for worldlyness by the world.

We all have a little weakness, which is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us. How future generations will get on without us is indeed, when we come to think of it, quite a puzzle. But I suppose they will get on somehow, and may possibly venture to revise our judgments as we have revised earlier judgments.

By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.

The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God's paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle - and not lose it.

(Tradition) is the democracy of the dead.

The English are no nearer than they were a hundred years ago to knowing what Jefferson really meant when he said that God had created all men equal.

The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead.

It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.

There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.

My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.

A man is angry at a libel because it is false, but at a satire because it is true.

There are two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren; the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death.

The best way that a man could test his readiness to encounter the common variety of mankind would be to climb down a chimney into any house at random, and get on as well as possible with the people inside. And that is essentially what each one of us did on the day that he was born.

America has a new delicacy, a coarse, rank refinement.

Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble may never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in. To the scientific eye all human history is a series of collective movements, destructions or migrations, like the massacre of flies in winter or the return of birds in spring.

Right is Right even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it.

Coincidence is a spiritual pun.

It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.

We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means.

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.

It seems a pity that psychology has destroyed all our knowledge of human nature.

[There is] one distinctly human thing - the story. There can be as good science about a turnip as about a man. ... [Or philosophy, or theology] ...There can be, without any question at all, as good higher mathematics about a turnip as about a man. But I do not think, though I speak in a manner somewhat tentative, that there could be as good a novel written about a turnip as a man.

The lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one; he is the man who lives in a tenth of the truth, and thinks it is the whole. The madman cannot conceive any cosmos outside a certain tale or conspiracy or vision.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

Every great literature has always been allegorical - allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The 'Iliad' is only great because all life is a battle, the 'Odyssey' because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.

The great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All goods look better when they look like gifts.

For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers.

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

Nobody notices postmen, yet they have passions like other men.

Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.

No man can break any of the Ten Commandments. He can only break himself against them.