GK Chesterton quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by GK Chesterton

Top GK Chesterton Quotes

Browse top 774 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by GK Chesterton.

Favorite GK Chesterton Quotes

1. "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

2. "War in the wide modern sense, is possible, not because more men disagree, but because more men agree." ~ G.K. Chesterton

3. "Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel." ~ G.K. Chesterton

4. "It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But 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, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period." ~ G.K. Chesterton

5. "This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities." ~ G.K. Chesterton

6. "But nearly all of the people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure." ~ G.K. Chesterton

7. "The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous." ~ G.K. Chesterton

8. "The modern world is filled with men who hold dogmas so strongly that they do not even know that they are dogmas. It may be said even that the modern world, as a corporate body, holds certain dogmas so strongly that it does not know that they are dogmas. It may be thought 'dogmatic,' for instance, in some circles accounted progressive, to assume the perfection or improvement of man in another world. But it is not thought "dogmatic" to assume the perfection or improvement of man in this world; though that idea of progress is quite as unproved as the idea of immortality, and from a rationalistic point of view quite as improbable. Progress happens to be one of our dogmas, and a dogma means a thing which is not thought dogmatic." ~ G.K. Chesterton

9. "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

10. "Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined." ~ G.K. Chesterton

11. "A few people have ventured to imitate Shakespeare's tragedy. But no audacious spirit has dreamed or dared to imitate Shakespeare's comedy. No one has made any real attempt to recover the loves and the laughter of Elizabethan England. The low dark arches, the low strong pillars upon which Shakespeare's temple rests we can all explore and handle. We can all get into his mere tragedy; we can all explore his dungeon and penetrate into his coal-cellar, but we stretch our hands and crane our necks in vain towards that height where the tall turrets of his levity are tossed towards the sky. Perhaps it is right that this should be so; properly understood, comedy is an even grander thing than tragedy." ~ G.K. Chesterton

12. "Once abolish the God and the government becomes the God." ~ G.K. Chesterton

13. "What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity." ~ G.K. Chesterton

14. "A radical does not mean a man who lives on radishes," remarked Crook, with some impatience; "and a Conservative does not mean a man who preserves jam. Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep. A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it." ~ G.K. Chesterton

15. "I merely declare my independence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools in the universe; and I shall not admit that any of them are blunted merely because they have been used." ~ G.K. Chesterton

16. "Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist." ~ G.K. Chesterton

17. "If the moderns really want a simple religion of love, they must look for it in the Athanasian Creed. The truth is that the trumpet of true Christianity, the challenge of the charities and simplicities of Bethlehem or Christmas Day never rang out more arrestingly and unmistakably than in the defiance of Athanasius to the cold compromise of the Arians. It was emphatically he who really was fighting for a God of Love against a God of colourless and remote cosmic control; the God of the stoics and the agnostics. It was emphatically he who was fighting for the Holy Child against the grey deity of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. He was fighting for that very balance of beautiful interdependence and intimacy, in the very Trinity of the Divine Nature, that draws our hearts to the Trinity of the Holy Family. His dogma, if the phrase be not misunderstood, turns even God into a Holy Family." ~ G.K. Chesterton

18. "Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles." ~ G.K. Chesterton

19. "Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously! I don't often have the luck to have a dream like this. It is new to me for a nightmare to lead me to a lobster. It is commonly the other way." ~ G.K. Chesterton

20. "Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition." ~ G.K. Chesterton

21. "The things we see every day are the things we never see at all." ~ G.K. Chesterton

22. "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

23. "We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced." ~ G.K. Chesterton

24. "Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural." ~ G.K. Chesterton

25. "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

26. "Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree." ~ G.K. Chesterton

27. "You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it." ~ G.K. Chesterton

28. "Teach to the young, men's enduring truths, and let the learned amuse themselves with their passing errors." ~ G.K. Chesterton

29. "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

30. "There was one special thing you promised me at the beginning of the affair, and which you have certainly given me by the end of it.""What do you mean?" cried the chaotic Gregory. "What did I promise you?""A very entertaining evening," said Syme, and he made a military salute with his sword-stick as the steamboart slid away." ~ G.K. Chesterton

31. "By insisting specially on the immanence of God we get introspection, self-isolation, quietism, social indifference – Tibet. By insisting specially on the transcendence of God we get wonder, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation – Christendom. Insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God transcends man, man has transcended himself." ~ G.K. Chesterton

32. "Do you think Friday unlucky? No, I think Friday lucky, All Christian people, whatever their lighter superstitions, have always thought Friday lucky. Otherwise they would have talked about Bad Friday instead of Good Friday." ~ G.K. Chesterton

33. "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

34. "somehow one must love the world without being worldly." ~ G.K. Chesterton

35. "Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful." ~ G.K. Chesterton

36. "Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity." ~ G.K. Chesterton

37. "Father Brown got to his feet, putting his hands behind him. 'Odd, isn't it,' he said, 'that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?" ~ G.K. Chesterton

38. "That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child." ~ G.K. Chesterton

39. "There are no chains of houses; there are no crowds of men. The colossal diagram of streets and houses is an illusion, the opium dream of a speculative builder. Each of these men is supremely solitary and supremely important to himself. Each of these houses stands in the centre of the world. There is no single house of all those millions which has not seemed to someone at some time the heart of all things and the end of travel." ~ G.K. Chesterton

40. "Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it." ~ G.K. Chesterton

41. "I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible." ~ G.K. Chesterton

42. "There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell." ~ G.K. Chesterton

43. "Man is more himself, more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing and grief superficial." ~ G.K. Chesterton

44. "Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed." ~ G.K. Chesterton

45. "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

46. "Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness." ~ G.K. Chesterton

47. "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

48. "Therefore I see no wrong in riding with the Nightmare to-night; she whinnies to me from the rocking tree-tops and the roaring wind; I will catch her and ride her through the awful air. Woods and weeds are alike tugging at the roots in the rising tempest, as if all wished to fly with us over the moon, like that wild, amorous cow whose child was the Moon-Calf. We will rise to that mad infinite where there is neither up nor down, the high topsy-turveydom of the heavens. I will ride on the Nightmare; but she shall not ride on me." ~ G.K. Chesterton

49. "sin -- a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing." ~ G.K. Chesterton

50. "Is that all?" asked Flambeau after a long pause. "Have we got to the dull truth at last?""Oh, no," said Father Brown.As the wind died in the most distant pine woods with a long hoot as of mockery Father Brown, with an utterly impassive face, went on:"I only suggested that because you said one could not plausibly connect snuff with clockwork or candles with bright stones. Ten false philosophies will fit the universe; ten false theories will fit Glengyle Castle. But we want the real explanation of the castle and the universe. But are there no other exhibits?"Craven laughed, and Flambeau rose smiling to his feet and strolled down the long table. [Ch.6]" ~ G.K. Chesterton

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