G.K. Chesterton quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from G.K. Chesterton on Wise Famous Quotes.

One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

He had that combination of savoir-faire with a sort of well-groomed coarseness which is not uncommon in young doctors.

why, nobody's ever survived it! Look at all the people married since Adam and Eve - and all as dead as mutton.

People always brag about their vices; it is when they begin to brag about their virtues that they become insufferable.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.

You are my only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you.

And the second as an old man might say it about the weather; not without sincerity but certainly without fervour.

for we admire things with reasons, but love them without reasons. He

I have not faith enough to believe in matter.

But our modern educationists are trying to bring about a religious liberty without attempting to settle what is religion or what is liberty. If

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

...it ought to be the oldest things that are taught to the youngest people".
GKC

But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind.

Everything human must have in it both joy and sorrow; the only matter of interest is the manner in which the two things are balanced or divided.

The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age

No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.

Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.

{We} have not to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule; rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can't.

It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.

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

The men of the east may search the scrolls,
For sure fates and fame,
But the men that drink the blood of God go singing to their shame.

Once abolish the God and the government becomes the God.

The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.

They do not destroy orthodoxy; they only destroy political courage and common sense.

The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.

Adventures happen on dull days, and not on sunny ones. When the chord of monotony is stretched most tight, then it breaks with a sound like song.

Romance is the deepest thing in life. It is deeper than reality.

He liked as he liked; he seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking.

A liberal is a noble and indispensable lunatic who tries to make a cosmos of his own head.

I sincerely maintain that Nature-worship is more morally dangerous than the most vulgar man-worship of the cities;

Perfectly," replied Syme; "always be comic in a tragedy.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

There nearly always is a method in madness.

Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world.

We can accept man as a fact, if we are content with an unexplained fact.

A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once.

little things please great minds.

When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.

Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason ... that is its reason for existing.

You prosecute the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common, But leave the larger felon loose Who steals the common from the goose.

The modern State has educated its citizens in a series of ephemeral fads.

If you want to know what you are, you are a set of highly well-intentioned young jackasses.

It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced.

In every society, the rich are the scum of the earth.

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

To the delight of the poetic little gutter boys in the little grey streets.

Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.

Is literature better, is politics better, for having discarded the moralist and the philosopher?

The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

There is no bigot like the atheist.

Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians.

The men of the East may spell the stars,
And times and triumphs mark,
But the men signed of the cross of Christ
Go gaily in the dark.

Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.

Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet.

Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of hte god within.

They stoned the false prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophets with a greater and juster enjoyment.

To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.

He has a fancy for always sitting in a pitch-dark room. He says it makes his thoughts brighter.

He who wills to reject nothing, wills the destruction of will; for will is not only the choice of something, but the rejection of almost everything.

The fundamental things in a man are not the things he explains, but rather the things he forgets to explain.

Then I realized that for eighteen hundred years the Church Militant had not been a pageant, but a riot - and a suppressed riot. There,

It is now certain that the public does know. It is not so certain that the public does care.

War in the wide modern sense, is possible, not because more men disagree, but because more men agree.

The classes that wash most are those that work least.

Self is the gorgon.

The true soldier fights

It is assumed that the skeptic has no bias; whereas he has a very obvious bias in favour of skepticism.

A stone is helpless, because a stone is hard. The stone must by its own nature go downwards, because hardness is weakness.

When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.

Self-denial is the test and definition of self-government.

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

Strike a glass and it will not endure an instant. Simply do not strike it and it will endure a thousand years.

Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of

Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.

This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.

Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead.

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

We may find men wrong in what they thought they were, but we cannot find them wrong in what they thought they thought.

Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined.

He had the notion that because I am a clergyman I should believe anything. Many people have little notions of that kind.
- Father Brown

My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true prophecies.

For a large lemon moon was only just setting in the forest of high grass above their heads,

CHAPTER II. - The Maniac

That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.

Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.

The obvious truth is that the moment any matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes of science.

The devil takes us to the top of an exceeding high mountain and makes us dizzy; but God lets us look at the mountain.

The sun has set," said Horne Fisher, in the same terrible tones, "and he will never see it rise again.

What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.

There are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.

Man is the microcosm; man is the measure of all things; man is the image of God.

The more a man looks at a thing, the less he can see it, and the more a man learns a thing, the less he knows it.

Flippancy is a flower whose roots are often underground in the subconsciousness.

Being a nation means standing up to your equals, whereas being an empire only means kicking your inferiors.

Leisure is being allowed to do nothing.

For with the removal of all question of merit or payment, the soul is suddenly released for incredible voyages.

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