Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

Any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate. It is as true of democratic fraternity as a divine love; sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy; but real love has always ended in bloodshed.

We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.

If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.

Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.

The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint.

Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses.

Teach to the young, men's enduring truths, and let the learned amuse themselves with their passing errors.

It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.

I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small... We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel...

The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.

Unfortunately, 19th-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were 17th-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation . . . . and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion.

Paradox - Truth standing on her head to get attention.

Nothing taken for granted; everything received with gratitude; everything passed on with grace.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbour.

All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national.

I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.

A large section of the intelligentsia seems wholly devoid of intelligence.

It is better to speak wisdom foolishly like the saints than to speak folly wisely like the deans.

A faith is that which is able to survive a mood.

Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.

If the barricades went up in our streets and the poor became masters, I think the priests would escape, I fear the gentlemen would; but I believe the gutters would simply be running with the blood of philanthropists.

Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.

Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.

The modern world has far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn. People forgot that the human soul can enjoy a thing most when there is time to think about it and be thankful for it. And by crowding things together they lost the sense of surprise; and surprise is the secret of joy.

Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king.

They say travel broadens the mind, but you must have the mind.

Being a success at work is not worth it if it means being a failure at home.

Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally.

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

In Catholicism, the pint, the pipe and the Cross can all fit together.

We fear men so much, because we fear God so little. One fear cures another. When man's terror scares you, turn your thoughts to the wrath of God.

Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.

Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas . . . for it is the assertion of a universal negative.

What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

It is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment.

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.

The miser is the man who starves himself and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.