173 G.K. Chesterton Quotes

The really great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."

We do not want a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

If there were no God, there would be no atheists.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.

True contentment is a thing as active as agriculture. It is the power of getting out of any situation all that there is in it. It is arduous and it is rare.

Gullibility is the key to all adventures. The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

Youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged.

There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.

The word "good" has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

The present condition of fame is merely fashion.

The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

New roads; new ruts.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education. Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

Man does not live by soap alone; and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.