Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

At least five times, with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist skeptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Christian Faith has to all appearance, gone to the dogs? But, in each of these five cases, it was the dog that died.

Feminists are those who cannot stand female characteristics.

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world... The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.

The modern world... has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

If a rhinoceros were to enter this restaurant now, there is no denying he would have great power here. But I should be the first to rise and assure him that he had no authority whatever.

The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.

There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable one. The trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite.

The Christian pities men because they are dying, and the Buddhist pities them because they are living. The Christian is sorry for what damages the life of a man; but the Buddhist is sorry for him because he is alive.

One can hardly think too little of one's self. One can hardly think too much of one's soul.

...I will praise the English climate till I die—even if I die of the English climate. There is no weather so good as English weather. Nay, in a real sense there is no weather at all anywhere but in England. In France you have much sun and some rain; in Italy you have hot winds and cold winds; in Scotland and Ireland you have rain, either thick or thin; in America you have hells of heat and cold, and in the Tropics you have sunstrokes varied by thunderbolts. But all these you have on a broad and brutal scale, and you settle down into contentment or despair.

Sometimes he even embarrassed the company by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal and a Conservative.

There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.

I entertain a private suspicion that physical sports were much more really effective and beneficent when they were not taken quite so seriously. One of the first essentials of sport being healthy is that it should be delightful; it is rapidly becoming a false religion with austerities and prostrations.

But we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet. Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.

The perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfillments of an adventure must be real, or the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun vowing.

A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying, 'Of course I do not like green cheese. I am very fond of brown sherry.

The highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story.

Man is at his tallest when he bows.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.

Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things–pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people.

The power which makes a man able to entertain a good impulse is the same as that which enables him to make a good gun; it is imagination.

The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank.

In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

At the back of our brains is a blaze of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life is to dig for this sunrise of wonder.

The word good has many meanings.

And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.

Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else.

Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?

The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.

The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.

But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit - and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist - and a Catholic.

It is always the secure who are humble.

It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. . . . But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it.

No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.

There are a good many fools who call me a friend, and also a good many friends who call me a fool.

It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch.

Americans are a very backward people, with all the real virtues of a backward people; the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.

It was not the house that grew dull, but I that grew dull in it. My wife was better than all women, and yet I could not feel it.