Welcome to our collection of quotes by G. K. Chesterton. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
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."
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.
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.
Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, but that the dead are living.
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.
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.
A nation that has nothing but its amusements will not be amused for long.
When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.
Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas ... for it is the assertion of a universal negative.
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.
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?
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Earth will grow worse till men redeem it, And wars more evil, ere all wars cease.
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.
It is better to speak wisdom foolishly like the saints than to speak folly wisely like the deans.
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.
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.
But since he stood for England And knew what England means, Unless you give him bacon You must not give him beans.
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.
Our digestions, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry.
The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together.
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.
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.
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.
Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.
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.
The ignorant pronounce it Frood To cavil or applaud The well-informed pronounce it Froyd But I pronounce it Fraud.
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.
The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child.
There is, therefore, about all complete conviction a kind of huge helplessness.
We are learning to do a great many clever things. The next great task will be to learn not to do them.
I tell you naught for your comfort, Yea, naught for your desire, Save that the sky grows darker yet And the sea rises higher.
Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.
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.
Every work of art has one indispensable mark ... the center of it is simple, however much the fulfillment may be complicated.
Idolatry is when you worship what you should use, and use what you should worship.
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.
What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another.
Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.
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.
I've searched all the parks in all the cities -- and found no statues of Committees.
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.
When the chord of monotony is stretched to its tightest, it breaks with the sound of a song.
Every man speaks of public opinion, and means by public opinion, public opinion minus his opinion.
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.
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.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
There are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.
And we were angry and poor and happy, And proud of seeing our names in print.
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.
Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.
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.
And pray where in earth or heaven are there prudent marriages-Might as well talk about prudent suicides.
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.
I am the fool in this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.
One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.
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.
Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.
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.
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.
Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims.
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.
An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.
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.