Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
G. K. Chesterton was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic. He has been referred to as the “prince of paradox”. (G. K. Chesterton Quotes)
“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“A man’s minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“A miracle is startling; but it is simple. It is simple because it is a miracle.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“A philanthropist may be said to love anthropoids. But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“A pickpocket is obviously a champion of private enterprise. But it would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that a pickpocket is a champion of private property. The point about Capitalism and Commercialism, as conducted of late, is that they have really preached the extension of business rather than the preservation of belongings; and have at best tried to disguise the pickpocket with some of the virtues of the pirate.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Outline of Sanity
“A puddle repeats infinity, and is full of light; nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“A religion is not the church a man goes to but the cosmos he lives in; and if any sceptic forgets it, the maddest fanatic beating an Orange drum about the Battle of the Boyne is a better philosopher than he.”
G. K. Chesterton
Irish Impressions
“A saint is long past any desire for distinction; he is the only sort of superior man who has never been a superior person.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“A scientific government, with a really ethical responsibility to posterity, would be always looking for the line of promise and progress;”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“All his actions had something at once ambitious and conscientious; he drank no wine, but was slightly intoxicated with words. And his face and phrases were on the front page of all the newspapers just then, because he was contesting the safe seat of Sir Francis Verner in the great by-election in the west.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“All revolutions are doctrinal—such as the French one, or the one that introduced Christianity. For it stands to common sense that you cannot upset all existing things, customs, and compromises, unless you believe in something outside them, something positive and divine.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“All the jokes about men sitting down on their hats are really theological jokes; they are concerned with the Dual Nature of Man. They refer to the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost… Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“Alone on earth, the Church makes reason really supreme. Alone on earth, the Church affirms that God himself is bound by reason.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday
“An egoist,” said Father Brown. “She was the sort of person who had looked in the mirror before looking out of the window, and it is the worst calamity of mortal life.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“And he set to rhyme his ale-measures, And he sang aloud his laws, Because of the joy of giants, The joy without a cause.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ballad of the White Horse
“And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday
“And pray where in earth or heaven are there prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“And the greatest of the poets, when he defined the poet, did not say that he gave us the universe or the absolute or the infinite; but, in his own larger language, a local habitation and a name.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“And though the old man’s scarlet face and silver beard had blazed like a bonfire in each room or passage in turn, it did not leave any warmth behind it.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“And when he became conscious of a human figure dark against the silver stream, sitting on a large boulder and looking rather like a large bird, it was perhaps with some of the premonitions proper to a man who meets the strangest friendship of his life.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reckon on the unforeseen.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“Babies need not to be taught a trade, but to be introduced to a world.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“Before we congratulate ourselves upon the absence of certain faults from our nation or society, we ought to ask ourselves why it is that these faults are absent. Are we without the fault because we have the opposite virtue? Or are we without the fault because we have the opposite fault?”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“Being a nation means standing up to your equals, whereas being an empire only means kicking your inferiors.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“Believe me, you never know the best about men till you know the worst about them.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed: a passage which some have considered as a prophecy of modern journalism.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“Buddhism and Christianity are in one sense parallel and equal; as a mound and a hollow, as a valley and a hill. There is a sense in which that sublime despair is the only alternative to that divine audacity. It is even true that the truly spiritual and intellectual man sees it as sort of dilemma; a very hard and terrible choice. There is little else on earth that can compare with these for completeness. And he who does not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“But anyhow it is true that this, which is our first poem, might very well be our last poem too. It might well be the last word as well as the first word spoken by man about his mortal lot, as seen by merely mortal vision. If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“But as St. Francis did not love humanity but men, so he did not love Christianity but Christ.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“But is it so hard for you people to believe that spiritual powers are really more powerful than material ones.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“But it’s my reading of human nature that a man will cheat in his trade, but not in his hobby.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“But of all the instances of error arising from this physical fancy, the worst is that we have before us: the habit of exhaustively describing a social sickness, and then propounding a social drug.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“Capitalism believes in collectivism for itself and individualism for its enemies.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Superstition of Divorce
“Charity means pardoning what is unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Christianity is always out of fashion because it is always sane; and all fashions are mild insanities. When Italy is mad on art the Church seems too Puritanical; when England is mad on Puritanism the Church seems too artistic. When you quarrel with us now you class us with kingship and despotism; but when you quarrelled with us first it was because we would not accept the divine despotism of Henry VIII. The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last summer. It keeps the key of a permanent virtue.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ball and the Cross
“Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Complaint always comes back in an echo from the ends of the world; but silence strengthens us.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Secret of Father Brown
“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“Despite the almost aggressive touch of luxury in the fur coat, it soon became apparent that Sir Walter’s large leonine head was for use as well as ornament, and he considered the matter soberly and sanely enough.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“Dog doesn’t eat dog, and doctors don’t bite doctors, not even when they are mad doctors. I shouldn’t care to cast any reflection on my eminent predecessor in Potter’s Pond, if I could avoid it;”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“Every true artist does feel, consciously or unconsciously, that he is touching transcendental truths; that his images are shadows of things seen through the veil.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“Fairy tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“Falsehood is never so false as when it is very nearly true. It is when the stab comes near the nerve of truth, that the Christian conscience cries out in pain.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“Father Brown tossed the paper on the floor and sat bolt upright in his chair. ‘You mustn’t let that sort of stuff stupefy you,’ he said sharply. ‘These devils always try to make us helpless by making us hopeless.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“Father Brown: I never said it was always wrong to enter fairyland, I only said it was always dangerous.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“For my part, I think brightness more important than cleanliness; since the first is of the soul, and the second of the body.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“For our law has in it a turn of humour or touch of fancy which Nero and Herod never happened to think of; that of actually punishing homeless people for not sleeping at home.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“For the modern world will accept no dogmas upon any authority; but it will accept any dogmas on no authority. Say that a thing is so, according to the Pope or the Bible, and it will be dismissed as a superstition without examination. But preface your remark merely with “they say” or “don’t you know that?” or try (and fail) to remember the name of some professor mentioned in some newspaper; and the keen rationalism of the modern mind will accept every word you say.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Superstition of Divorce
“For the moral basis, it is obvious that man’s ethical responsibility varies with his knowledge of consequences”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“For the perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them; what we call its triviality is really the tag-ends of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“For the White Horse knew England When there was none to know; He saw the first oar break or bend, He saw heaven fall and the world end, O God, how long ago.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ballad of the White Horse
“For the world of science and evolution is far more nameless and elusive and like a dream than the world of poetry and religion; since in the latter images and ideas remain themselves eternally, while it is the whole idea of evolution that identities melt into each other as they do in a nightmare.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ball and the Cross
“For we human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter of the incongruous; it is a tune to which we can go to sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang of a perfect chord.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“Gentlemen used to lie just as schoolboys lie, because they hung together and partly to help one another out.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“God alone knows what the conscience can survive, or how a man who has lost his honor will still try to save his soul.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“He also knew a great deal about art, letters, philosophy, and general culture; about almost everything, indeed, except the world he was living in.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“He declares his privacy is temporary and justified, and promises to explain before the wedding. That is all that anyone knows for certain, but Mrs MacNab will tell you a great deal more than even she is certain of. You know how the tales grow like grass on such a patch of ignorance as that.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Wisdom of Father Brown
“He discovered the fact that all romantics know—that 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.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday
“He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments. It”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one. It is only the last and wildest kind of courage that can stand on a tower before ten thousand people and tell them that twice two is four.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics / Orthodoxy
“He is a sane man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“He liked as he liked; he seems to have liked everybody, but especially those whom everybody disliked him for liking.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“He spoke in that sweet and steely voice which he reserved for great occasions and practiced for hours together in his bedroom.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Club of Queer Trades
“He was only one of those young men who cannot support the burden of consciousness unless they are doing something, and whose conceptions of doing something are limited to a game of some kind.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“He was, to the last agonies of asceticism, a Troubadour. He was a Lover. He was a lover of God and he was really and truly a lover of men; possibly a much rarer mystical vocation.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday
“Here Christ was indeed human; but more human than a human being was then likely to be. Peter Pan does not belong to the world of Pan but the world of Peter.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“His Aristotelianism simply meant that the study of the humblest fact will lead to the study of the highest truth.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“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. I begin to see a new meaning in being the skeleton at the feast.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“I am told that the Japanese method of wrestling consists not of suddenly pressing, but of suddenly giving way. This is one of my many reasons for disliking Japanese civilization.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“I believe firmly in the value of all vulgar notions, especially of vulgar jokes. When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally found that the converted do not understand their own religion.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“I can hardly conceive of any educated man believing in God at all without believing that God contains in Himself every perfection including eternal joy; and does not require the solar system to entertain Him like a circus.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“I can imagine no more successful and productive form of manufacture than that of making mountains out of molehills.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“I could forgive you even your cruelty if it were not for your calm.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Well and the Shallows
“I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“I do not object to Socialism because it will revolutionize our commerce, but because it will leave it so horribly the same.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“I don’t deny,” he said, “that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“I have known some people of very modern views driven by their distress to the use of theological terms to which they attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was jammed tight and they could not pull it out.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“I have never been to St. John’s Wood. I dare not. I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to come upon a blood red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“I know it is praised with high professions of idealism and benevolence; with silver-tongued rhetoric about purer motherhood and a happier posterity.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“I mean that God bade me love one spot and serve it, and do all things however wild in praise of it, so that this one spot might be a witness against all the infinities and the sophistries, that Paradise is somewhere and not anywhere, is something and not anything.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it it really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Club of Queer Trades
“I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top of a tree.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ballad of the White Horse
“I want to be taken to a madhouse,” said Turnbull distinctly, giving the direction with a sort of precision. “I want to go back to exactly the same lunatic asylum from which I came.” “Why?” asked the unknown. “Because I want a little sane and wholesome society,” answered Turnbull.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ball and the Cross
“I will go forth as a real outlaw,” he said, “and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway; and it will be counted a wilder crime.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Return of Don Quixote
“If the devil tells you something is too fearful to look at, look at it. If he says something is too terrible to hear, hear it. If you think some truth unbearable, bear it.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Wisdom of Father Brown
“If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“If you know what a man’s doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he’s doing, keep behind him.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“If you’d take your head home and boil it for a turnip it might be useful. I can’t say. But it might.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday
“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“In short, there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“In the beginning of the twentieth century you could not see the ground for clever men. They were so common that a stupid man was quite exceptional, and when they found him, they followed him in crowds down the street and treasured him up and gave him some high post in the State.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities…it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“In the light of after events there seemed to be something monstrous and ominous about that exuberance, something of the spirit that is called fey. At the time it merely crossed a few people’s minds that he might possibly be drunk.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“In the lower classes the school master does not work for the parent, but against the parent. Modern education meanshanding down the customs of the minority, and rooting out the customs of the majority.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“International peace means a peace between nations, not a peace after the destruction of nations, like the Buddhist peace after the destruction of personality. The golden age of the good European is like the heaven of the Christian: it is a place where people will love each other; not like the heaven of the Hindu, a place where they will be each other.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all the sons of God. Jesus”
G. K. Chesterton
In Defense of Sanity
“It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“It is incomprehensible to me that any thinker can calmly call himself a modernist; he might as well call himself a Thursdayite.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“It is ludicrous to suppose that the more sceptical we are the more we see good in everything. It is clear that the more we are certain what good is, the more we shall see good in everything.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“It is no good to tell an atheist that he is an atheist; or to charge a denier of immortality with the infamy of denying it; or to imagine that one can force an opponent to admit he is wrong, by proving that he is wrong on somebody else’s principles, but not on his own. After the great example of St. Thomas, the principle stands, or ought always to have stood established; that we must either not argue with a man at all, or we must argue on his grounds and not ours.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“It is not really difficult to sum up the essence of Eugenics: though some of the Eugenists seem to be rather vague about it.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“It is often said by the critics of Christian origins that certain ritual feasts, processions or dances are really of pagan origin. They might as well say that our legs are of pagan origin. Nobody ever disputed that humanity was human before it was Christian; and no Church manufactured the legs with which men walked or danced, either in a pilgrimage or a ballet.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Superstition of Divorce
“It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn’t.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday
“It may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colors that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday
“It might be questioned whether hammering is more of a strain on the attention because it may go on for ever, or because it may stop at any minute.”
G. K. Chesterton
“It needed ten times more courage to look after a leper than to fight for the crown of Sicily”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“It will be generally found that the popular joke is not true to the letter, but is true to the spirit. The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“It would be wrong to say that she commanded; for her own efficiency was so impatient that she obeyed herself before anyone else obeyed her.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday
“Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Look at the eyebrows. They mean that infernal pride which made Satan so proud that he sneered even at heaven when he was one of the first angels in it. Look at his moustaches, they are so grown as to insult humanity. In the name of the sacred heavens look at his hair. In the name of God and the stars, look at his hat.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Club of Queer Trades
“Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“Lucifer sang through the skies like a silver arrow; the bleak white steel of it, gleaming in the bleak blue emptiness of the evening.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ball and the Cross
“Lying in bed would be an altogether supreme experience if one only had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“Man does not necessarily begin with despotism because he is barbarous, but very often finds his way to despotism because he is civilised. He finds it because he is experienced; or, what is often much the same thing, because he is exhausted”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Man is a free knight that might betray his Lord.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ballad of the White Horse
“Man is not a balloon going up into the sky, nor a mole burrowing merely in the earth; but rather a thing like a tree, whose roots are fed from the earth, while its highest branches seem to rise almost to the stars.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Many a man has owed the first white gleams of the dawn of Democracy in his soul to a desire to find a stick and beat the butler.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Flying Inn
“Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?”
G. K. Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“Men are moved most by their religion; especially when it is irreligion.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of. Men have never wearied of political justice; they have wearied of waiting for it.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“Men must receive the highest moral truths in a miraculous manner; or most men would not receive them at all.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“Men represent the deliberative and democratic element in life. Woman represents the despotic.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“Modern intelligence won’t accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“Moderns think of the earth as a globe, as something one can easily get round, the spirit of a schoolmistress. This is shown in the odd mistake perpetually made about Cecil Rhodes. His enemies say that he may have had large ideas, but he was a bad man. His friends say that he may have been a bad man, but he certainly had large ideas. The truth is that he was not a man essentially bad, he was a man of much geniality and many good intentions, but a man with singularly small views.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics / Orthodoxy
“Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, “I will not hit you if you do not hit me”; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, “We must not hit each other in the holy place.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics / Orthodoxy
“Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“My brain and this world don’t fit each other; and there’s an end of it.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true prophecies.”
G. K. Chesterton
Irish Impressions
“Mysticism conceives something transcending experience; religion seeks glimpses of a better good or a worse evil than experience can give. Reincarnation need only extend experiences in the sense of repeating them.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Newspapers not only deal with news, but they deal with everything as if it were entirely new.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“No gleam of reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realised exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he’s got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“Nobody understands the nature of the Church, or the ringing note of the creed descending from antiquity, who does not realize that the whole world once very nearly died of broadmindedness and the brotherhood of all religions.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Now this is the attitude which I attack. It is the huge heresy of Precedent. It is the view that because we have got into a mess we must grow messier to suit it; that because we have taken a wrong turn some time ago we must go forward and not backwards; that because we have lost our way we must lose our map also; and because we have missed our ideal, we must forget it.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“Now this modern refusal to undo what has been done is not only an intellectual fault; it is a moral fault also. It is not merely our mental inability to understand the mistake we have made. It is also our spiritual refusal to admit that we have made a mistake.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“Of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is the man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“Of being strong and brave. The strong can not be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“One could fancy that the voices from the under world of unfathomable foliage were cries of the lost and wandering pagan gods: gods who had gone roaming in that irrational forest, and who will never find their way back to heaven.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“Only a man who knows nothing of motors talks of motoring without petrol; only a man who knows nothing of reason talks of reasoning without strong, undisputed first principles.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“Only conscious of the closeness of the elephant when the colossal head blocked out the moon.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“Our civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the thing that I felt in that jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the Founder of Christianity.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible justice, or even a recognizable wrong. But our existence is still a story. In the fiery alphabet of every sunset is written, “to be continued in our next.”
G. K. Chesterton
In Defense of Sanity
“People always brag about their vices; it is when they begin to brag about their virtues that they become insufferable.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“People like frequent laughter,” answered Father Brown, “but I don’t think they like a permanent smile. Cheerfulness without humour is a very trying thing.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“People will tell you that theories don’t matter and that logic and philosophy aren’t practical. Don’t you believe them. Reason is from God, and when things are unreasonable there is something the matter.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“People, if you have any prayers, Say prayers for me: And lay me under a Christian stone In that lost land I thought my own, To wait till the holy horn is blown, And all poor men are free.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ballad of the White Horse
“Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Physiologists, But if one took a volume of Chaucer or Shelley from that rank, its absence irritated the mind like a gap in a man’s front teeth. One could not say the books were never read; probably they were, but there was a sense”
G. K. Chesterton
The Wisdom of Father Brown
“Plato in some sense anticipated the Catholic realism, as attacked by the heretical nominalism, by insisting on the equally fundamental fact that ideas are realities; that ideas exist just as men exist. Plato however seemed sometimes almost to fancy that ideas exist as men do not exist; or that the men need hardly be considered where they conflict with the ideas.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“Private lives are more important than public reputations.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“Satan was the most celebrated of Alpine guides, when he took Jesus to the top of an exceeding high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth. But the joy of Satan in standing on a peak is not a joy in largeness, but a joy in beholding smallness, in the fact that all men look like insects at his feet.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“She had never really listened to anyone in her life; which, some said, was why she had survived.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“She was not in the least afraid of loneliness, because she was not afraid of devils. I think they were afraid of her.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ball and the Cross
“Something lay in the shadow at the foot of the ridge, as stiff as the stick of the fallen rocket; and the man who knew too much knew what is worth knowing.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“Sometimes he even embarrassed the company by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal and a Conservative.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“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’.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?”
G. K. Chesterton
The Club of Queer Trades
“Telling the truth about the terrible struggle of the human soul is surely a very elementary part of the ethics of honesty.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“That fairy tale was the nearest thing to the real truth that has been said today.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Hammer of God
“That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face – that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“The adoration of Christ had been a part of the man’s passionate nature for a long time past. But the imitation of Christ, as a sort of plan or ordered scheme of life, in that sense may be said to begin here.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“The aim of human polity is human happiness…There is no obligation on us to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or in any way worldlier or wealthier, if it does not make us happier. Mankind has as much right to scrap its machinery and live on the land, if he really likes it better, as any man has to sell his old bicycle and go for a walk, if he likes that better. It is obvious that the walk will be slower; but he has no duty to be fast.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Outline of Sanity
“The author challenges how much sanctity has to do with sameness, as he says saints are as different from each other as those in any group – even murderers.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ball and the Cross
“The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Blue Cross
“The devotee boasted that he would never abandon the faith; and therefore he persecuted for the faith. But the doctor of science actually boasts that he will always abandon a hypothesis; and yet he persecutes for the hypothesis. The Inquisitor violently enforced his creed, because it was unchangeable. The savant enforces it violently because he may change it the next day.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“The external fact fertilizes the internal intelligence, as the bee fertilizes the flower. Anyhow, upon that marriage, or whatever it may be called, the whole system of St. Thomas is founded; God made Man so that he was capable of coming in contact with reality; and those whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, ‘If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ballad of the White Horse
“The high tide!” King Alfred cried. “The high tide and the turn! As a tide turns on the tall grey seas, See how they waver in the trees, How stray their spears, how knock their knees, How wild their watchfires burn!”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ballad of the White Horse
“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“The instinct of democracy is like the instinct of one woman, wild but quite right”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“The joke is generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“The little sins are sometimes harder to confess than the big ones—but that’s why it’s so important to confess them.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Wisdom of Father Brown
“The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“The man has not spoken for hours; and yet he has been speaking all the time.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“The man, like the mouse, undermines what he cannot understand. Because he bumps into a thing, he calls it the nearest obstacle; though the obstacle may happen to be the pillar that holds the roof over his head. he industriously removes the obstacle; and in return the obstacle removes him; and much more valuable things than he.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Superstition of Divorce
“The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ball and the Cross
“The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: that people do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it may or may not be right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivably be right to kill a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“The modern instinct is that if the heart of man is evil, there is nothing that remains good. But the older feeling was that if the heart of man was ever so evil, there was something that remained good–goodness remained good.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“The modern mind always mixes up two different ideas: mystery in the sense of what is marvellous, and mystery in the sense of what is complicated. That is half its difficulty about miracles.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“The modern mind is hard to please; and it generally calls the way of Godfrey ferocious and the way of Francis fanatical. That is, it calls any moral method unpractical, when it has just called any practical method immoral.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy like a bird in spring.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“The modern world is insane, not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the normal.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood without a god.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“The obvious effect of frivolous divorce will be frivolous marriage. If people can be separated for no reason they will feel it all the easier to be united for no reason.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Superstition of Divorce
“The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“The perplexity of life arises from their being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them; what we call it’s triviality is really the tag-ends of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“The pessimist can be enraged at wrong; but only the optimist can be surprised at it.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“The priest looked puzzled also, as if at his own thoughts; he sat with knotted brow and then said abruptly: ‘You see, it’s so easy to be misunderstood. All men matter. You matter. I matter. It’s the hardest thing in theology to believe.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“The primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“The Protestant theology of Martin Luther was a thing that no modern Protestant would be seen dead in a field with; or if the phrase be too flippant, would be specially anxious to touch with a barge-pole.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“The pure modernist is merely a snob; he cannot bear to be a month behind the fashion.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“The quality of a miracle is mysterious, but its manner is simple.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“The Saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“The schoolboy had something of the stolid air of a young duke doing the grand tour, while his elderly relative was reduced to the position of a courier, who nevertheless had to pay for everything like a patron.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“The servants of God who had been a besieged garrison became a marching army; the ways of the world were filled as with thunder with the trampling of their feet and far ahead of that ever swelling host went a man singing; as simply he had sung that morning in the winter woods, where he walked alone.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“The sixteenth-century schism was really a belated revolt of the thirteenth-century pessimists. It was a back-wash of the old Augustinian Puritanism against the Aristotelian liberality.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Well and the Shallows
“The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“The transition from the good man to the saint is a sort of revolution; by which one for whom all things illustrate and illuminate God becomes one for whom God illustrates and illuminates all things.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“The travellers looked at it with that paradoxical feeling we have when something reminds us of something, and yet we are certain it is something very different.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“The truth is people who worship health cannot remain healthy on the point.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“The way to build a church is not to pay for it, certainly not with somebody else’s money. The way to build a church is not to pay for it even with your own money. The way to build a church is to build it.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“The woman does not work because the man tells her to work and she obeys. On the contrary, the woman works because she has told the man to work and he hasn’t obeyed.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“The word ‘heresy’ not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word ‘orthodoxy’ not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“There are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are wicked.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Club of Queer Trades
“There are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“There are no rationalists. We all believe fairy-tales, and live in them.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“There are some refusals which, though they may be done what is called conscientiously, yet carry so much of their whole horror in the very act of them, that a man must in doing them not only harden but slightly corrupt his heart. One of them was the refusal of milk to young mothers when their husbands were in the field against us. Another is the refusal of fairy tales to children.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place…”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place; and I tried to trace such a journey in a story I once wrote.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“There are two ways of renouncing the devil,” he said; “and the difference is perhaps the deepest chasm in modern religion. One is to have a horror of him because he is so far off; and the other to have it because he is so near. And no virtue and vice are so much divided as those two virtues.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Outline of Sanity
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“There is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“There nearly always is method in madness. It’s what drives men mad, being methodical. And he never goes on sitting there after sunset, with the whole place getting dark.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“There was a man who had a fly in his eye when he looked through the telescope, and he discovered that there was a most incredible dragon in the moon.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“There’s another thing you’ve got to remember. You talk about these highbrows having a higher art and a more philosophical drama. But remember what a lot of the philosophy is! Remember what sort of conduct those highbrows often present to the highest! All about the Will to Power and the Right to Live and the Right to Experience — damned nonsense and more than damned nonsense — nonsense that can damn.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“These men were conscious of the Fall, if they were conscious of nothing else; and the same is true of all heathen humanity. Those who have fallen may remember the fall, even when they forget the height. Some such tantalising blank or break in memory is at the back of all pagan sentiment.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“They stoned the false prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophets with a greater and juster enjoyment.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“They were content to follow Francis with their praises until they were stopped by their prejudices; the stubborn prejudices of the skeptic.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“Thieves respect property; they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“This man’s spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“Through all this modern muddle there runs the curious principle of sacrificing the ancient uses of things because they do not fit in with the modern abuses.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“To be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings. To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance. Of all these great limitations and frameworks which fashion and create the poetry and variety of life, the family is the most definite and important. Hence it is misunderstood by the moderns, who imagine that romance would exist most perfectly in a complete state of what they call liberty. They think that if a man makes a gesture it would be a startling and romantic matter that the sun should fall from the sky. But the startling and romantic thing about the sun is that it does not fall from the sky. They are seeking under every shape and form a world where there are no limitations—that is, a world where there are no outlines; that is, a world where there are no shapes. There is nothing baser than that infinity. They say they wish to be as strong as the universe, but they really wish the whole universe as weak as themselves.”
G. K. Chesterton
In Defense of Sanity
“To each man one soul only is given; to each soul only is given a little power – the power at some moments to outgrow and swallow up the stars.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“To hurry through one’s leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“To introduce an ethic which makes that fidelity or infidelity vary with some calculation about heredity is that rarest of all things, a revolution that has not happened before.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction,” said Basil placidly. “For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Club of Queer Trades
“Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“Unfortunately he was one of those who always tend to take their own fancies seriously; and in whose otherwise legitimate extravagance there is too little of the juice of the jest.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Flying Inn
“We are Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key, but because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is the trumpet of liberty blow over the land of the living.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Everlasting Man
“We are in this fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“We can no more analyse such peace in the soul than we can conceive in our heads the whole enormous and dizzy equilibrium by which, out of suns roaring like infernos and heavens toppling like precipices, He has hanged the world upon nothing.”
G. K. Chesterton
Eugenics and Other Evils
“We may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“We might even say that the one thing which separates a saint from ordinary men is his readiness to be one with ordinary men. In this sense the word ordinary must be understood in its native and noble meaning; which is connected with the word order.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Thomas Aquinas
“We must not hate humanity, or despise humanity, or refuse to help humanity; but we must not trust humanity; in the sense of trusting a trend in human nature which cannot turn back to bad things.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Well and the Shallows
“We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot.”
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics
“We shall have gone deeper than the deeps of heaven and grown older than the oldest angels before we feel, even in its first faint vibrations, the everlasting violence of that double passion with which God hates and loves the world.”
G. K. Chesterton
Manalive
“We’re all really dependent in nearly everything, and we all make a fuss about being independent in something.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“What a strange world in which a man cannot remain unique even by taking the trouble to go mad.”
G. K. Chesterton
All Things Considered
“What had happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world was coloured by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural passions.”
G. K. Chesterton
Saint Francis of Assisi
“What we all dread most,” said the priest in a low voice, “is a maze with no centre. That is why atheism is only a nightmare.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Wisdom of Father Brown
“When a man really tells the truth, the first truth he tells is that he himself is a liar.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
“When he thought of a joke he made it, and was called brilliant. When he could not think of a joke he said that this was no time for trifling, and was called able.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else’s Bible?”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“When you say you want all peoples to unite, you really mean that you want all peoples to unite to learn the tricks of your people.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Innocence of Father Brown
“Wherever men are still theological there is still some chance of their being logical.”
G. K. Chesterton
Irish Impressions
“White is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. God paints in many colors; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. ”
G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
“Without the family, we are helpless before the State.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Superstition of Divorce
“You are my only friend in the world, and I want to talk to you. Or, perhaps, be silent with you.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Complete Father Brown
“You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.”
G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
“You can’t be angry with bad men. But a good man in the wrong—why one thirsts for his blood.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ball and the Cross
“You complain of Catholicism for setting up an ideal of virginity; it did nothing of the kind. The whole human race set up an ideal of virginity; the Greeks in Athene, the Romans in the Vestal fire, set up an ideal of virginity. What then is your real quarrel with Catholicism? Your quarrel can only be, your quarrel really only is, that Catholicism has _achieved_ an ideal of virginity; that it is no longer a mere piece of floating poetry.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Ball and the Cross
“You have not wasted your time; you have helped to save the world. We are not buffoons, but very desperate men at war with a vast conspiracy.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“You know I always liked you,” said Fisher, quietly, “but I also respect you, which is not always the same thing. You may possibly guess that I like a good many people I don’t respect. Perhaps it is my tragedy, perhaps it is my fault. But you are very different, and I promise you this: that I will never try to keep you as somebody to be liked, at the price of your not being respected.”
G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Knew Too Much
“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.”
G. K. Chesterton
What’s Wrong with the World
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