Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

It is very good for a man to talk about what he does not understand; as long as he understands that he does not understand it.

Architecture is the alphabet of giants; it is the largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men. A tower stands up like a sort of simplified stature, of much more than heroic size.

I do not believe that any human being is fundamentally happier for being finally lost in a crowd, even if it is called a crowd of comrades.

There are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are wicked.

We have not made cricket and football [soccer] professional because of any astonishing avarice or new vulgarity. We have made them professional because we would have them perfect. We have dedicated men to them as to some god of inhuman excellence. We care more for football than for the fun of playing football.

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.

So far as a man may be proud of a religion rooted in humility, I am very proud of my religion; I am especially proud of those parts of it that are most commonly called superstition. I am proud of being fettered by antiquated dogmas and enslaved by dead creeds (as my journalistic friends repeat with so much pertinacity), for I know very well that it is the heretical creeds that are dead, and that it is only the reasonable dogma that lives long enough to be called antiquated.

I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do - I can die.

Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a grey day a "colourless" day. Grey is a colour, and can be a very powerful and pleasing colour ... A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun; so is a green tree, if it comes to that. But the grey umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style and shape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, and another grey like dove's plumage. One may seem grey like the deathly frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens.

An artist will betray himself by some sort of sincerity.

When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.

For my part, I should be inclined to suggest that the chief object of education should be to restore simplicity. If you like to put it so, the chief object of education is not to learn things; nay, the chief object of education is to unlearn things.

Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless that the colors of an autumn forest ... Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them , in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

THERE are no wise few; for in all men rages the folly of the Fall. Take your strongest, happiest, handsomest, best born, best bred, best instructed men on earth and give them special power for half an hour and because they are men they will begin to [perform] badly ...

Christianity, whatever else it is, is an explosion. Unless it is sensational there is simply no sense in it. Unless the Gospel sounds like a gun going off it has not been uttered at all.

But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticize the government. Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God. That fact is written all across human history; but it is written most plainly across the recent history of Russia; which was created by Lenin. There the government is the God, and all the more the God, because it proclaims aloud in accents of thunder ... one essential commandment, Thou shalt have no other gods but Me.

We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city.

We talk of wild animals, but the wildest animal is man.

It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms.

It's natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things.

We're all in the same boat, and we're all seasick.

The danger of loss of faith in God is not that one will believe in nothing, but rather that one will believe in anything.

In truth the Church is too unique to prove herself unique. For most popular and easy proof is by parallel; and here there is no parallel.

Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root.

Every time a man knocks on a brothel door, he is really knocking for God

All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them.

There are a good many fools who call me a friend, and also a good many friends who call me a fool.

Facts by themselves can often feed the flame of madness, because sanity is a spirit.

There must be some good in the life of battle, for so many good men have enjoyed being soldiers.

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

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.

Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.

The life of a thinking man will probably be divided into two parts
the first in which he desires to exterminate modern thinkers, and the second in which he desires to watch them exterminating each other ... Suppose, for instance, there is an old story and a new skeptic who is skeptical of the story. We have only to wait a little while for a yet newer skeptic who is skeptical of the skeptic. He will probably find the old notion actually a help in his new notion. This process is an abstract truth applying to anything, apart from agreement or disagreement.

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

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

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.

Comradeship is quite a different thing from friendship ...

Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings; but they dream of being shepherds.

Nothing is certain by uncertainty.

I don't need a church to tell me I'm wrong where I already know I'm wrong; I need a Church to tell me I'm wrong where I think I'm right

War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.

Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink.

The full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent take it by storm. And if we have accepted everything we have missed something - war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce.

Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion.

The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his cake and have it. He has no sense of honor about ideas; he will not see that one must pay for an idea as well as for anything else. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other.

It is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counter-irri-tants to each other.

It has been left to the last Christians, or rather to the first Christians fully committed to blaspheming and denying Christianity, to invent a new kind of worship of Sex, which is not even a worship of Life. It has been left to the very latest Modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility ... The new priests abolish the fatherhood and keep the feast - to themselves.

Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek.

Being a success at work is not worth it if it means being a failure at home.

Free verse'? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'.

A good Moslem king was one who was strict in religion, valiant in battle, just in giving judgment among his people, but not one who had the slightest objection in international matters to removing his neighbour's landmark.

The trouble with Christianity is, not that its failed, but that it's never been tried ... not that it can't remake the world, but that it's difficult.

The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.

With all that we hear of American hustle and hurry, it is rather strange that Americans seem to like to linger on longer words.

For they (capitalists) hold as their chief heresy, in a coarser form, the fundamental falsehood that things are not made to be used but made to be sold. All the collapse of their commercial system in their own time has been due to that fallacy of forcing things on a market where there was no market; of continually increasing the power of supply without increasing the power of demand; of briefly, of always considering the man who sells the potato and never considering the man who eats it.

Gratitude produced the most purely joyful moments that have been known to man.

The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.

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.

Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?

Though I believe in liberalism, I find it difficult to believe in liberals.

The position we have now reached is this: starting from the State, we try to remedy the failures of all the families, all the nurseries, all the schools, all the workshops, all the secondary institutions that once had some authority of their own. Everything is ultimately brought into the Law Courts. We are trying to stop the leak at the other end.

All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.

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

Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.

We are always giving foreign names to very native things. If there is a thing that reeks of the glorious tradition of the old English tavern, it is toasted cheese. But for some wild reason we call it Welsh rarebit. I believe that what we call Irish stew might more properly be called English stew, and that it is not particularly familiar in Ireland.

Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.

A tragedy means always a mans struggle with that which is stronger than man.

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

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much.

[Capitalism is] that commercial system in which supply immediately answers to demand, and in which everybody seems to be thoroughly dissatisfied and unable to get anything he wants.

Mankind is not a tribe of animals to which we owe compassion. Mankind is a club to which we owe our subscription.

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.

Leaving the complications of the human breakfast-table out of account, in an elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable in himself.

If our caricaturists do not hate their enemies, it is not because they are too big to hate them, but because their enemies are not big enough to hate.

Very few people in the world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy.

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.

All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.

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.

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

A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon.

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

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

Gratitude, being nearly the greatest of human duties, is also nearly the most difficult.

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

One can no more have a private religion than one can have a private sun or a private moon.

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

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.

Tolerance is a virtue of people who don't believe in anything anymore.

Such professions as the soldier and the lawyer ... give ample opportunity for crimes but not much for mere illusions ... If you have lost a battle you cannot believe you have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have gotten him off.

It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.

Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them.

I like the Americans for a great many reasons. I like them because even the modern thing called industrialism has not entirely destroyed in them the very ancient thing called democracy. I like them because they have a respect for work which really curbs the human tendency to snobbishness.

Agnostic is the Greek word, for the Latin word, for ignorant

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.

Mysticism keeps mankind sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity.

Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age.

Aristocracy: government by the badly educated.

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.