173 G.K. Chesterton Quotes

The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.

The mere brute pleasure of reading is the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

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

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 gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

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.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

Tolerance is the virtue of men who don't believe in anything.

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 that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbor.

People generally quarrel because they cannot argue.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

...but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone.

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kind of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind of cruelty.

Love is not blind; that is the last thing it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.

There is but an inch of difference between a cushioned chamber and a padded cell.

It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

Being "contented" ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being content with an attic ought not to mean being unable to move from it and resigned to living in it; it ought to mean appreciating all there is in such a position.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

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

Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

Whatever else may be said of man, this one thing is clear: He is not what he is capable of being.

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.

When we really worship anything, we love not only its clearness but its obscurity. We exult in its very invisibility.

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

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

Hell is God's great compliment to the reality of human freedom and the dignity of human choice.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

There is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

America is the only country ever founded on a creed.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

The coziness between church and state is good for the state and bad for the church.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul but his life.

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

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.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

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

I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed.

Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

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

A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.

For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers.

True contentment is a real, even an active, virtue - not only affirmative but creative. It is the power of getting out of any situation all there is in it.

The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.

Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are.

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

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

Happiness is a mystery, like religion, and should never be rationalized.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.

Children are innocent and love justice, while most adults are wicked and prefer mercy.

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.

The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.

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

The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.

Self-denial is the test and definition of self-government.

In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine times out of ten, a proof that you ought to publish it.

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.

Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs.

A stiff apology is a second insult. The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.

Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies: probably because they are generally the same people.

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.

Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

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

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

True contentment is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it.

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

Journalism largely consists of saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.