G. K. Chesterton Quotes

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

G. K. Chesterton
When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

G. K. Chesterton
But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

G. K. Chesterton
It was the people who did not care who filled the world with fire and oppression. It was the hands of the indifferent that lit the faggots; it was the hands of the indifferent that turned the rack.

G. K. Chesterton
And I will add this point of merely personal experience of humanity: when men have a real explanation they explain it, eagerly and copiously and in common speech, as Huxley freely gave it when he thought he had it. When they have no explanation to offer, they give short dignified replies, disdainful of the ignorance of the multitude.

G. K. Chesterton
Whatever the word "great" means, Dickens was what it means.

G. K. Chesterton
I think that if they gave me leave, Within the world to stand, I would be good through all the day I spent in fairyland. They should not hear a word from me, Of selfishness or scorn, If only I could find the door, If only I were born.

G. K. Chesterton
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.

G. K. Chesterton
The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister.

G. K. Chesterton
Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.

G. K. Chesterton
Our chiefs said 'Done,' and I did not deem it;
Our seers said 'Peace,' and it was not peace;
Earth will grow worse till men redeem it,
And wars more evil, ere all wars cease.

G. K. Chesterton
Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king.

G. K. Chesterton
As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War—they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do.

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

G. K. Chesterton
The people has no definite disbelief in the temples of theology. The people has a very fiery and practical disbelief in the temples of physical science.

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

G. K. Chesterton
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.

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

G. K. Chesterton
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.

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

G. K. Chesterton