G. K. Chesterton Quotes

844 Sourced Quotes

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

G. K. Chesterton
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.

G. K. Chesterton
Women prefer to talk in twos, while men prefer to talk in threes.

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

G. K. Chesterton
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

G. K. Chesterton
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.

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

G. K. Chesterton
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

G. K. Chesterton
Employers will give time to eat, time to sleep; they are in terror of a time to think.

G. K. Chesterton
We lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves.

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

G. K. Chesterton
Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.

G. K. Chesterton
St. George he was for England,
And before he killed the dragon
He drank a pint of English ale
Out of an English flagon.

G. K. Chesterton
Modern intelligence won't accept anything on authority. But it will accept anything without authority.

G. K. Chesterton
I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.

G. K. Chesterton
The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits.

G. K. Chesterton
Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.

G. K. Chesterton
Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.

G. K. Chesterton
It is the natural and legitimate ambition of a properly constituted geologist to see a glacier, witness an eruption and feel an earthquake.

G. K. Chesterton
You have no business to be an unbeliever. You ought to stand for all the things these stupid people call superstitions. Come now, don't you think there's a lot in those old wives' tales about luck and charms and so on, silver bullets included? What do you say about them as a Catholic?'
'I say I'm an agnostic,' replied Father Brown, smiling.
'Nonsense,' said Aylmer impatiently. 'It's your business to believe things.'
'Well, I do believe some things, of course,' conceded Father Brown; 'and therefore, of course, I don't believe other things.'.

G. K. Chesterton
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

G. K. Chesterton
There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth

G. K. Chesterton
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.

G. K. Chesterton
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...

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

G. K. Chesterton