Quotes by G. K. Chesterton

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.

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

Hope means expectancy when things are otherwise hopeless.

Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks.

Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.

The best kind of giving is thanksgiving.

I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean.

It is always the secure who are humble.

Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

To be simple is the best thing in the world.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The cross cannot be defeated for it is defeat.

Theology is only thought applied to religion.

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?

Aristocracy: government by the badly educated.

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.

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

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.

I am at one with my duality.

There are no boring subjects, only disinterested minds.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The moderns do not realize modernity.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Tradition is the democracy of the dead.

Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity.

Truths turn into dogmas the minute they are disputed.

Art is born when the temporary touches the eternal.

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

All government is an ugly necessity.

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.

Laughter has something in it common with the ancient words of faith and inspiration; it unfreezes pride and unwinds secrecy; it makes people forget themselves in the presence of something greater than themselves.

Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it.

Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

If Christianity should happen to be true -- that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe -- then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything.

There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.

All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.

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.

The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.

There is no bigot like the atheist.

The big corporation is not in the least remarkable for efficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency.

I believe your own accent is inimitable, though I shall practice it in my bath.

It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian.

Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.

Man is at his tallest when he bows.

It is customary to complain of the bustle and strenuousness of our epoch. But in truth the chief mark of our epoch is a profound laziness and fatigue; and the fact is that the real laziness is the cause of the apparent bustle.

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

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.

Contemporary society has become dry, not for lack of wonders but for lack of wonder.

Nine times out of ten it is the coarse word that condemns an evil, and the refined word that excuses it.

America has a new delicacy, a coarse, rank refinement.

Comradeship is obvious and universal and open; but it is only one kind of affection; it has characteristics that would destroy any other kind. Anyone who has known true comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows that it is impersonal.

Comradeship is quite a different thing from friendship.

These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

The only words that ever satisfied me as describing nature are the terms used in fairy books, charm, spell, enchantment; they express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.

A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State is growing insane.

Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future; we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.

Powerful men who have powerful passions use much of their strength in forging chains for themselves.

They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words -- 'free-love' -- as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free.

The true savage is a slave, and is always talking about what he must do; the true civilised man is a free man, and is always talking about what he may do.

The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides.

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.

Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.

The primary paradox of Christianity is that the ordinary condition of man is not his sane or sensible condition; that the normal itself is an abnormality.

A child's instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting. The child's hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression.

O God of earth and altar,
Bow down and hear our cry,
Our earthly rulers falter,
Our people drift and die;
The walls of gold entomb us,
The swords of scorn divide,
Take not thy thunder from us,
But take away our pride.

Whatever else we may say of our own age, for good or evil, nobody is likely to call it an Age of Reason.

A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art. ... The first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement.

Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

Shouldn't atheist have an equal obligation to explain pleasure in a world of randomness. Where does pleasure come from?

Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live.

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

The Mass is not only about God becoming man, it is about Man becoming more himself.

Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, 'We will not be dictated to,' and went off and became stenographers.

A feminist is someone who loathes being a woman and who dislikes the chief feminine characteristics.

A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher.

We can be almost certain of being wrong about the future, if we are wrong about the past.

When belief in God becomes difficult, the tendency is to turn away from Him; but in heaven's name to what?

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.

The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.

'It seems to me,' said the other, 'That you are simply seeking a pretext to insult the Marquis.' By George!' said Syme facing round and looking at him, 'What a clever chap you are!'

A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.

Christian Science … is the direct denial both of science and of Christianity, for Science rests wholly on the recognition of truth and Christianity on the recognition of pain.

And though St. John saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.

But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose.

I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.

Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?

A good joke is the closest thing we have to divine revelation.

Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?

Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.

People that insist upon drinking and driving, are putting the quart before the hearse.

A figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.

Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other's.

Now there is any amount of this nonsense cropping up among American cranks. Anybody may propose to establish coercive Eugenics; or enforce psychoanalysis that is, enforce confession without absolution.

The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.

You can't have the family farm without the family.

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down... Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.

The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.

It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.

All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost.

Freethinkers are occasionally thoughtful, though never free.

The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery.

People seem to fight about things very unsuitable for fighting. They make a frightful noise in support of very quiet things. They knock each other about in the name of very fragile things.

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

He said he didn't very well understand how George was going to sleep any more than he did now, seeing that there were only twenty-four hours in each day.

All good writers express the state of their souls, even (as occurs in some cases of very good writers) if it is a state of damnation.