Title Image - Quotes by Author G. K. Chesterton

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Wikipedia Summary for G. K. Chesterton

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer, philosopher, lay theologian, and literary and art critic.

He has been referred to as the "prince of paradox". Time magazine observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out."Chesterton created the fictional priest-detective Father Brown, and wrote on apologetics. Even some of those who disagree with him have recognised the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man.

Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an "orthodox" Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin.

On his contributions, T. S. Eliot wrote:

"He was importantly and consistently on the side of the angels. Behind the Johnsonian fancy-dress, so reassuring to the British public, he concealed the most serious and revolutionary designs—concealing them by exposure ... Chesterton's social and economic ideas...were fundamentally Christian and Catholic. He did more, I think, than any man of his time—and was able to do more than anyone else, because of his particular background, development and abilities as a public performer—to maintain the existence of the important minority in the modern world. He leaves behind a permanent claim upon our loyalty, to see that the work that he did in his time is continued in ours."

To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, but that the dead are living.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Longer Version:

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.


Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

The cross cannot be defeated for it is defeat.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Theology is only thought applied to religion.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

A nation that has nothing but its amusements will not be amused for long.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

ONCE remove the old arena of theological quarrels, and you will throw open the whole world to the most horrible, the most hopeless, the most endless, the most truly interminable quarrels; the untheological quarrels.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Here ends another day, during which I have had eyes, ears, hands and the great world around me. Tomorrow begins another day. Why am I allowed two?

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Aristocracy: government by the badly educated.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Men spoke much in my boyhood about restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it's a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is no better test of a man's ultimate chivalry and integrity than how he behaves when he is wrong... A stiff apology is a second insult.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Earth will grow worse till men redeem it, And wars more evil, ere all wars cease.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

When men cease to believe in God, they will believe in anything.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

What are we going to do? asked the Professor. At this moment, said Syme, with a scientific detachment, I think we are going to smash into a lamppost.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

But since he stood for England And knew what England means, Unless you give him bacon You must not give him beans.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

The human race is always trying this dodge of making everything entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts off one thing it shifts to another.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

I am at one with my duality.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

There are no boring subjects, only disinterested minds.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Our digestions, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

The more truly we can see life as a fairytale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war with the dragon who is wasting fairyland.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

The ignorant pronounce it Frood To cavil or applaud The well-informed pronounce it Froyd But I pronounce it Fraud.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

For us who live in cities Nature is not natural. Nature is supernatural. Just as monks watched and strove to get a glimpse of heaven, so we watch and strive to get a glimpse of earth. It is as if men had cake and wine every day but were sometimes allowed common bread.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

We are learning to do a great many clever things. The next great task will be to learn not to do them.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

It is only great men who take up a great space by not being there.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Education is implication. It is not the things you say which children

respect; when you say things, they very commonly laugh and do the opposite.

It is the things you assume which really sink into them. It is the things

you forget even to teach that they learn.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Every work of art has one indispensable mark ... the center of it is simple, however much the fulfillment may be complicated.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Idolatry is when you worship what you should use, and use what you should worship.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins of man. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takes the skies and the seasons for granted.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

The moderns do not realize modernity.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex (female) superiority that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

I've searched all the parks in all the cities -- and found no statues of Committees.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

When the chord of monotony is stretched to its tightest, it breaks with the sound of a song.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Every remedy is a desperate remedy. Every cure is a miraculous cure. Curing a madman is not arguing with a philosopher; it is casting out a devil.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

It is a mathematical fact that if a line be not perfectly directed towards a point, it will actually go further away from it as it comes nearer to it.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

There are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

And we were angry and poor and happy, And proud of seeing our names in print.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly; we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

When a woman puts up her fists to a man she is putting herself in the only posture in which he is not afraid of her.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

And pray where in earth or heaven are there prudent marriages-Might as well talk about prudent suicides.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation -- it is a
convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

I am the fool in this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

It's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse; it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

I still hold...that the suburbs ought to be either glorified by romance and religion or else destroyed by fire from heaven, or even by firebrands from the earth.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

God is not a symbol of goodness;
goodness is a symbol of God.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When he chooses a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that involve looking after other people's property.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Tradition is the democracy of the dead.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Truths turn into dogmas the minute they are disputed.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Art is born when the temporary touches the eternal.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

All government is an ugly necessity.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Destiny is but a phrase of the weak human heart -- the dark apology for every error. The strong and virtuous admit no destiny. On earth conscience guides; in heaven God watches. And destiny is but the phantom we invoke to silence the one and dethrone the other.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

--Gilbert K. Chesterton

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